Adversarial training attains strong empirical robustness to specific adversarial attacks by training on concrete adversarial perturbations, but it produces neural networks that are not amenable to strong robustness certificates through neural network verification. On the other hand, earlier certified training schemes directly train on bounds from network relaxations to obtain models that are certifiably robust, but display sub-par standard performance. Recent work has shown that state-of-the-art trade-offs between certified robustness and standard performance can be obtained through a family of losses combining adversarial outputs and neural network bounds. Nevertheless, differently from empirical robustness, verifiability still comes at a significant cost in standard performance. In this work, we propose to leverage empirically-robust teachers to improve the performance of certifiably-robust models through knowledge distillation. Using a versatile feature-space distillation objective, we show that distillation from adversarially-trained teachers consistently improves on the state-of-the-art in certified training for ReLU networks across a series of robust computer vision benchmarks.

Training large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, partly because the loss exhibits slow power-law convergence whose origin remains debatable. Through systematic analysis of toy models and empirical evaluation of LLMs, we show that this behavior can arise intrinsically from the use of softmax and cross-entropy. When learning peaked probability distributions, e.g., next-token distributions, these components yield power-law vanishing losses and gradients, creating a fundamental optimization bottleneck. This ultimately leads to power-law time scaling of the loss with a universal exponent of $1/3$. Our results provide a mechanistic explanation for observed neural scaling and suggest new directions for improving LLM training efficiency.

An'Intimacy Crisis' Is Driving the Dating Divide In his book, sex and relationships researcher Justin Garcia says people have miscalculated their need for human intimacy, which is the real issue at root of the loneliness epidemic. In the US, nearly half of adults are single. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Rates of depression are on the rise . And one in four Gen Z adults--the so-called kinkiest generation, according to one study --have never had partnered sex. In an age of endless connection, where hooking up happens with the ease of a swipe and nontraditional relationship structures like polyamory are celebrated, why are people seemingly so disconnected and alone?

A San Diego elementary school teacher faces scrutiny after video shows her turning an American flag upside down inside her first-grade classroom.

The American Revolution created a lasting democracy while the French Revolution became blood-soaked tyranny. But today's armchair revolutionaries echo similar calls.

Texas A&M eliminates Women's and Gender Studies certificate program after reviewing 5,400 course syllabi, canceling six courses representing 0.11% of total offerings.

CES 2026 showed that humanoid and embodied AI systems still have a long way to go before delivering real-world value, particularly in homes. At the same time, there is a growing sense that the path to deployment is becoming clearer. A consensus has emerged across platforms: multi-camera perception, often wrist-mounted, paired with VLA models, is sufficient for most tasks. Increasingly, tactile hands and VTLA software are added. There was a clear split between industrial and home-care humanoids.

Using LLMs to talk with your friends is efficient. My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was "not just --he was " coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate. It was both too good, in terms of being grammatically correct, and not good enough, in terms of being particular. My friend had no definitive proof that he was listening to AI, but his position--and I agree with him--is that when you know, you know. His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.

Students originally from overseas attend entrance exam preparation classes for high school advancement at YSC Global School in the city of Fussa, Tokyo, on Jan. 22. As policies related to foreign nationals are expected to be a major issue in Sunday's Lower House election in Japan, some are calling for improvements to Japanese language education for the children of foreign residents. In 2010, Youth Support Center, a nonprofit organization in the city of Fussa, Tokyo, established YSC Global School to provide Japanese language education and support for high school entry for children and young people with foreign roots, tailored to their proficiency levels. The school offers a total of 14 face-to-face and online courses and annually admits about 250 to 300 children from countries such as China, the Philippines and Nepal. Limited classrooms and instructors, however, hinder its ability to accommodate more students. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Barnsley has struggled with unemployment and deprivation since the coal pits closed. Barnsley has struggled with unemployment and deprivation since the coal pits closed. Barnsley rebranded UK's first'tech town' as US giants join AI push In 2002 Barnsley toyed with a redesign as a Tuscan hill village as it sought out a brighter post-industrial future. In 2021 it adopted the airily vague slogan "the place of possibilities". Now it is trying a different image: Britain's first "tech town".