As machine learning systems become increasingly embedded in human society, their impact on the natural world continues to escalate. Technical evaluations have addressed a variety of potential harms from large language models (LLMs) towards humans and the environment, but there is little empirical work regarding harms towards nonhuman animals. Following the growing recognition of animal protection in regulatory and ethical AI frameworks, we present the Animal Harm Assessment (AHA), a novel evaluation of risks of animal harm in LLM-generated text. Our dataset comprises 1,850 curated questions from Reddit post titles and 2,500 synthetic questions based on 50 animal categories (e.g., cats, reptiles) and 50 ethical scenarios, with further 70-30 public-private split. Scenarios include open-ended questions about how to treat animals, practical scenarios with potential animal harm, and willingness-to-pay measures for the prevention of animal harm. Using the LLM-as-a-judge framework, answers are evaluated for their potential to increase or decrease harm, and evaluations are debiased for the tendency to judge their own outputs more favorably. We show that AHA produces meaningful evaluation results when applied to frontier LLMs, revealing significant differences between models, animal categories, scenarios, and subreddits. We conclude with future directions for technical research and the challenges of building evaluations on complex social and moral topics.

With the rapid advancement of digitalization, various document images are being applied more extensively in production and daily life, and there is an increasingly urgent need for fast and accurate parsing of the content in document images. Therefore, this report presents PP-DocBee, a novel multimodal large language model designed for end-to-end document image understanding. First, we develop a data synthesis strategy tailored to document scenarios in which we build a diverse dataset to improve the model generalization. Then, we apply a few training techniques, including dynamic proportional sampling, data preprocessing, and OCR postprocessing strategies. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of PP-DocBee, achieving state-of-the-art results on English document understanding benchmarks and even outperforming existing open source and commercial models in Chinese document understanding. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleMIX}{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleMIX}.

Sampling from diffusion models involves a slow iterative process that hinders their practical deployment, especially for interactive applications. To accelerate generation speed, recent approaches distill a multi-step diffusion model into a single-step student generator via variational score distillation, which matches the distribution of samples generated by the student to the teacher's distribution. However, these approaches use the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for distribution matching which is known to be mode seeking. In this paper, we generalize the distribution matching approach using a novel $f$-divergence minimization framework, termed $f$-distill, that covers different divergences with different trade-offs in terms of mode coverage and training variance. We derive the gradient of the $f$-divergence between the teacher and student distributions and show that it is expressed as the product of their score differences and a weighting function determined by their density ratio. This weighting function naturally emphasizes samples with higher density in the teacher distribution, when using a less mode-seeking divergence. We observe that the popular variational score distillation approach using the reverse-KL divergence is a special case within our framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that alternative $f$-divergences, such as forward-KL and Jensen-Shannon divergences, outperform the current best variational score distillation methods across image generation tasks. In particular, when using Jensen-Shannon divergence, $f$-distill achieves current state-of-the-art one-step generation performance on ImageNet64 and zero-shot text-to-image generation on MS-COCO. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/f-distill

The Tate brothers left the Sunshine State Thursday ahead of an expected court appearance in Romania, but influencer and former MMA fighter Andrew Tate says he'll be back. Andrew Tate is back in America, forcing us to confront his perverse messaging to a subset of America's young men. But what we really need to come to grips with are the social conditions in our culture that created an opening for this men's rights Frankenstein. Tate, 38, is a former professional kickboxer facing sex trafficking charges in Romania, serious enough that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insists the podcast star is not welcome in the Sunshine State, where he landed earlier this week; the Florida attorney general is now investigating Tate and his brother Tristan. ANDREW TATE SAYS HE PLANS TO LIVE IN FLORIDA DESPITE'HEE HAW' OVER RETURN TO US SOIL Tate made a fortune off of a "webcam model" (read: porn) business, then began selling online courses ostensibly teaching alienated boys and young men how to become alpha males.

This paper examines the intricate interplay among AI safety, security, and governance by integrating technical systems engineering with principles of moral imagination and ethical philosophy. Drawing on foundational insights from Weapons of Math Destruction and Thinking in Systems alongside contemporary debates in AI ethics, we develop a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework designed to regulate AI technologies deployed in high-stakes domains such as defense, finance, healthcare, and education. Our approach combines rigorous technical analysis, quantitative risk assessment, and normative evaluation to expose systemic vulnerabilities inherent in opaque, black-box models. Detailed case studies, including analyses of Microsoft Tay (2016) and the UK A-Level Grading Algorithm (2020), demonstrate how security lapses, bias amplification, and lack of accountability can precipitate cascading failures that undermine public trust. We conclude by outlining targeted strategies for enhancing AI resilience through adaptive regulatory mechanisms, robust security protocols, and interdisciplinary oversight, thereby advancing the state of the art in ethical and technical AI governance.

We study the classical and parameterized complexity of computing the positive non-clashing teaching dimension of a set of concepts, that is, the smallest number of examples per concept required to successfully teach an intelligent learner under the considered, previously established model. For any class of concepts, it is known that this problem can be effortlessly transferred to the setting of balls in a graph G. We establish (1) the NP-hardness of the problem even when restricted to instances with positive non-clashing teaching dimension k=2 and where all balls in the graph are present, (2) near-tight running time upper and lower bounds for the problem on general graphs, (3) fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the vertex integrity of G, and (4) a lower bound excluding fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the feedback vertex number and pathwidth of G, even when combined with k. Our results provide a nearly complete understanding of the complexity landscape of computing the positive non-clashing teaching dimension and answer open questions from the literature.

With recent dramatic increases in AI system capabilities, there has been growing interest in utilizing machine learning for reasoning-heavy, quantitative tasks, particularly mathematics. While there are many resources capturing mathematics at the high-school, undergraduate, and graduate level, there are far fewer resources available that align with the level of difficulty and open endedness encountered by professional mathematicians working on open problems. To address this, we introduce a new collection of datasets, the Algebraic Combinatorics Dataset Repository (ACD Repo), representing either foundational results or open problems in algebraic combinatorics, a subfield of mathematics that studies discrete structures arising from abstract algebra. Further differentiating our dataset collection is the fact that it aims at the conjecturing process. Each dataset includes an open-ended research-level question and a large collection of examples (up to 10M in some cases) from which conjectures should be generated. We describe all nine datasets, the different ways machine learning models can be applied to them (e.g., training with narrow models followed by interpretability analysis or program synthesis with LLMs), and discuss some of the challenges involved in designing datasets like these.

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs), have opened new possibilities in education and in particular on scaling up personalization. One form of personalization that generative AI powers is interactive learning via tutoring dialogues between AI-powered tutors and students. These interactions have the potential to tailor instruction to each student's needs and progress, while offering personalized feedback, all in real time, in a scalable way. Given the widespread success of human tutors for improving student outcomes [29], many recent works have developed LLM-based tutors, showing promise across various educational domains [15, 25, 30, 32, 33, 39, 42, 50]. Many LLM-based tutors are even deployed in practice, such as Khan Academy's Khanmigo [21] and Carnegie Learning's LiveHint [4]. Several preliminary studies have shown that interacting with LLMs can increase student learning [52], although some have shown that students can develop an over-reliance on LLMs which negatively impacts their learning [23]. Many prior works have focused on improving LLMs' ability to follow effective tutoring principles, adapting them for the tutoring task that they are not pre-trained for. One approach, explored in [46], analyzes the decision-making process underlying human tutor utterances, showing that integrating expert decisions enhances LLM-based tutoring. Another study, [28], examines tutor moves in interactions with an LLM-powered simulated student agent, demonstrating that move annotation data contributes to better tutoring performance.

Lifelong learning (LL) aims to continuously acquire new knowledge while retaining previously learned knowledge. A central challenge in LL is the stability-plasticity dilemma, which requires models to balance the preservation of previous knowledge (stability) with the ability to learn new tasks (plasticity). While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has been widely adopted in large language models, its application to lifelong learning remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes AdaLL, an adapter-based framework designed to address the dilemma through a simple, universal, and effective strategy. AdaLL co-trains the backbone network and adapters under regularization constraints, enabling the backbone to capture task-invariant features while allowing the adapters to specialize in task-specific information. Unlike methods that freeze the backbone network, AdaLL incrementally enhances the backbone's capabilities across tasks while minimizing interference through backbone regularization. This architectural design significantly improves both stability and plasticity, effectively eliminating the stability-plasticity dilemma. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaLL consistently outperforms existing methods across various configurations, including dataset choices, task sequences, and task scales.

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that can produce highly realistic samples for various tasks. Typically, these models are constructed using centralized, independently and identically distributed (IID) training data. However, in practical scenarios, data is often distributed across multiple clients and frequently manifests non-IID characteristics. Federated Learning (FL) can leverage this distributed data to train diffusion models, but the performance of existing FL methods is unsatisfactory in non-IID scenarios. To address this, we propose FedDDPM-Federated Learning with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models, which leverages the data generative capability of diffusion models to facilitate model training. In particular, the server uses well-trained local diffusion models uploaded by each client before FL training to generate auxiliary data that can approximately represent the global data distribution. Following each round of model aggregation, the server further optimizes the global model using the auxiliary dataset to alleviate the impact of heterogeneous data on model performance. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis of FedDDPM and propose an enhanced algorithm, FedDDPM+, to reduce training overheads. FedDDPM+ detects instances of slow model learning and performs a one-shot correction using the auxiliary dataset. Experimental results validate that our proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art FL algorithms on the MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets.