Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by an iconic political photo Top plastic surgeons reveal secrets behind Taylor Swift's'changing' face: 'It is looking very full' Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection Hollywood A-listers pay me $50,000 to cure their drug addicted nepo-babies because they can't afford for these secrets to go public 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 Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split The truth about Keith Urban's guitarist'other woman' Maggie Baugh revealed amid Nicole Kidman divorce 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 I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with 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?

Science fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin is honoured with a new collection out this month, and sci-fi fans can also look forward to fiction from astronaut Chris Hadfield and award-winning authors Ken Liu and Mary Robinette Kowal Like many of you, no doubt, Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favourite sci-fi writers. So I am really excited about a collection out this month that brings together the maps she would draw when starting a story, and also celebrates her brilliant and wise writing. Not least because we've just read with the New Scientist Book Club: do come and join us and share your thoughts on this classic novel with fellow fans! The sci-fi out this month looks forward as well as back, though. Ken Liu brings us a thriller set in the near future, and I'm keen to read Megha Majumdar's tale of a flooded Kolkata and a desperate mother.

Existing Reward Models (RMs), typically trained on general preference data, struggle in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) settings, which require judging responses for faithfulness to retrieved context, relevance to the user query, appropriate refusals when context is insufficient, completeness and conciseness of information. To address the lack of publicly available RAG-centric preference datasets and specialised RMs, we introduce RAGferee, a methodology that repurposes question-answering (QA) datasets into preference pairs that prioritise groundedness over stylistic features, enabling the training of contextual RMs better suited to judging RAG responses. Using RAGferee, we curate a small preference dataset of 4K samples and fine-tune RMs ranging from 7B to 24B parameters. Our RAG-centric RMs achieve state-of-the-art performance on ContextualJudgeBench, surpassing existing 70B+ RMs trained on much larger (up to 2.4M samples) general corpora, with an absolute improvement of +15.5%.

Calibrated confidence estimates are necessary for large language model (LLM) outputs to be trusted by human users. While LLMs can express their confidence in human-interpretable ways, verbalized LLM-generated confidence scores have empirically been found to be miscalibrated, reporting high confidence on instances with low accuracy and thereby harming trust and safety. We hypothesize that this overconfidence often stems from a given LLM's heightened suggestibility when faced with claims that it encodes little information about; we empirically validate this hypothesis, finding more suggestibility on lower-accuracy claims. To further improve calibration, we leverage generator-validator disagreement, augmenting normalized validator confidence with a consistency-based estimate of generator confidence. Users often rely on information obtained from these models to make important decisions, but the information is not always accurate. Thus, we seek to qualify LLM responses with confidence estimates that are calibrated, i.e. match the probability of correctness. Users and agentic frameworks often use LLMs in a zero-shot manner without task-specific tuning (Manakul et al., 2023; Geng et al., 2024; Feng et al., 2024; Shorinwa et al., 2025), motivating the development of confidence estimation methods that work in off-the-shelf settings - both gray-box settings with logit access, and black-box settings with only textual input and output. In these settings, verbalized confidence is a simple and commonly-used approach that prompts the model to report its confidence in an answer (Lin et al., 2022; Xiong et al., 2024; Wei et al., 2024). For brevity, we use verbalized confidence as a blanket term for (1) asking the model to decode a numerical confidence like "80%" (Tian et al., 2023) and (2) asking the model whether an answer is correct and taking P(True) (Kadavath et al., 2022). V erbalized confidence is appealing for several reasons, including that it resembles one way humans express confidence, making it easy to interpret and integrate into decision-theoretic frameworks (Sun et al., 2025; Steyvers et al., 2025). However, verbalized confidence has several drawbacks. First, it empirically tends to exhibit overconfidence (Tian et al., 2023; Xiong et al., 2024; Wei et al., 2024; Xu et al., 2025); Figure 1 (left) shows that verbalized confidence scores generally outstrip average accuracy within a confidence bin. For each bar, we label the number of instances whose confidence falls in the interval and we darken larger bins. In other words, no rejection threshold can be chosen to reject a high proportion of false claims.

The proliferation of open large language models (LLMs) is fostering a vibrant ecosystem of research and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). However, the methods of collaboration used to develop open LLMs both before and after their public release have not yet been comprehensively studied, limiting our understanding of how open LLM projects are initiated, organized, and governed as well as what opportunities there are to foster this ecosystem even further. We address this gap through an exploratory analysis of open collaboration throughout the development and reuse lifecycle of open LLMs, drawing on semi-structured interviews with the developers of 14 open LLMs from grassroots projects, research institutes, startups, and Big Tech companies in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. We make three key contributions to research and practice. First, collaboration in open LLM projects extends far beyond the LLMs themselves, encompassing datasets, benchmarks, open source frameworks, leaderboards, knowledge sharing and discussion forums, and compute partnerships, among others. Second, open LLM developers have a variety of social, economic, and technological motivations, from democratizing AI access and promoting open science to building regional ecosystems and expanding language representation. Third, the sampled open LLM projects exhibit five distinct organizational models, ranging from single company projects to non-profit-sponsored grassroots projects, which vary in their centralization of control and community engagement strategies used throughout the open LLM lifecycle. We conclude with practical recommendations for stakeholders seeking to support the global community building a more open future for AI.

Visual personalization is essential in user-facing AI systems such as smart homes and healthcare, where aligning model behavior with user-centric concepts is critical. However, recent large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), despite their broad applicability, remain underexplored in their ability to adapt to individual users. In this paper, we introduce MMPB, the first extensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs on personalization. MMPB comprises 10k image-query pairs and includes 111 personalizable concepts across four categories: humans, animals, objects, and characters, with the human category enriched with preference-grounded queries. We structure personalization into three main task types, each highlighting a different key property of VLMs. Using 23 widely used VLMs including both open- and closed-source models, we evaluate personalization performance via a three-stage protocol: concept injection, multi-turn dialogue, and personalized querying. Our findings indicate that most VLMs (including some closed-source models) struggle with personalization, particularly in maintaining consistency over dialogue, handling user preferences, and adapting to visual cues. Our analysis reveals that the challenges in VLM personalization (such as refusal behaviors and long-context forgetting) highlight substantial room for improvement. By identifying these limitations and offering a scalable benchmark, MMPB offers valuable insights and a solid foundation for future research toward truly personalized multi-modal AI. Project Page: aidaslab.github.io/MMPB

Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by an iconic political photo Top plastic surgeons reveal secrets behind Taylor Swift's'changing' face: 'It is looking very full' Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection Hollywood A-listers pay me $50,000 to cure their drug addicted nepo-babies because they can't afford for these secrets to go public 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 Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split The truth about Keith Urban's guitarist'other woman' Maggie Baugh revealed amid Nicole Kidman divorce 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 I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with 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?

Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by an iconic political photo Top plastic surgeons reveal secrets behind Taylor Swift's'changing' face: 'It is looking very full' Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection Hollywood A-listers pay me $50,000 to cure their drug addicted nepo-babies because they can't afford for these secrets to go public 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 Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split The truth about Keith Urban's guitarist'other woman' Maggie Baugh revealed amid Nicole Kidman divorce 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 I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with 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?

Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by the most iconic political photo of the century Top plastic surgeons reveal secrets behind Taylor Swift's'changing' face: 'It is looking very full' Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection Hollywood A-listers pay me $50,000 to cure their drug addicted nepo-babies because they can't afford for these secrets to go public 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 Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split I'm a woman with autism... here are the signs you might be masking, even from yourself Diddy sentenced to 50 MONTHS in prison for prostitution offenses as he's branded a vile and unrepentant woman beater I've loved Taylor Swift for years. I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with Cake-faced 90s sitcom star looks unrecognizable as she ditches the heavy eyeshadow for an LA errand run can you guess who?

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They've been a road map for the billionaire ever since. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the (the scriptural term for "that which withholds" the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world--in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel's katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show--which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I've been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there. The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel's chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon--and all the things he believed were "not enough" to prevent it. By Thiel's telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our "listless" and "zombie" age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the "endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web." But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon--the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI--modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist. According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. "How might such an Antichrist rise to power?" Thiel asked.