The CHiME-7 and 8 distant speech recognition (DASR) challenges focus on multi-channel, generalizable, joint automatic speech recognition (ASR) and diarization of conversational speech. With participation from 9 teams submitting 32 diverse systems, these challenges have contributed to state-of-the-art research in the field. This paper outlines the challenges' design, evaluation metrics, datasets, and baseline systems while analyzing key trends from participant submissions. From this analysis it emerges that: 1) Most participants use end-to-end (e2e) ASR systems, whereas hybrid systems were prevalent in previous CHiME challenges. This transition is mainly due to the availability of robust large-scale pre-trained models, which lowers the data burden for e2e-ASR. 2) Despite recent advances in neural speech separation and enhancement (SSE), all teams still heavily rely on guided source separation, suggesting that current neural SSE techniques are still unable to reliably deal with complex scenarios and different recording setups. 3) All best systems employ diarization refinement via target-speaker diarization techniques. Accurate speaker counting in the first diarization pass is thus crucial to avoid compounding errors and CHiME-8 DASR participants especially focused on this part. 4) Downstream evaluation via meeting summarization can correlate weakly with transcription quality due to the remarkable effectiveness of large-language models in handling errors. On the NOTSOFAR-1 scenario, even systems with over 50% time-constrained minimum permutation WER can perform roughly on par with the most effective ones (around 11%). 5) Despite recent progress, accurately transcribing spontaneous speech in challenging acoustic environments remains difficult, even when using computationally intensive system ensembles.

Scientific progress in Earth science depends on integrating data across the planet's interconnected spheres. However, the accelerating volume and fragmentation of multi-sphere knowledge and data have surpassed human analytical capacity. This creates a major bottleneck for discovery, especially in climate science. To address this challenge, we introduce EarthLink, the first self-evolving AI agent system designed as an interactive "copilot" for Earth scientists. Through natural language interaction, EarthLink automates the entire research workflow by integrating planning, code execution, data analysis, and physical reasoning into a unified process that directly addresses this limitation. Beyond efficiency, it exhibits human-like cross-disciplinary analytical ability and achieves proficiency comparable to a junior researcher in expert evaluations on core large-scale climate tasks, including model-observation comparison and climate change understanding. When tasked with an open scientific problem, specifically the discovery of precursors of the Atlantic Niño, EarthLink autonomously developed a research strategy, identified sources of predictability, verified its hypotheses with available data, and proposed a physically consistent mechanism. These emerging capabilities enable a new human-AI research paradigm. Scientists can focus on value and result judgments, while AI systems handle complex data analysis and knowledge integration. This accelerates the pace and breadth of discovery in Earth sciences. The system is accessible at our website https://earthlink.intern-ai.org.cn.

Oversight and control, which we collectively call supervision, are often discussed as ways to ensure that AI systems are accountable, reliable, and able to fulfill governance and management requirements. However, the requirements for "human oversight" risk codifying vague or inconsistent interpretations of key concepts like oversight and control. This ambiguous terminology could undermine efforts to design or evaluate systems that must operate under meaningful human supervision. This matters because the term is used by regulatory texts such as the EU AI Act. This paper undertakes a targeted critical review of literature on supervision outside of AI, along with a brief summary of past work on the topic related to AI. We next differentiate control as ex-ante or real-time and operational rather than policy or governance, and oversight as performed ex-post, or a policy and governance function. Control aims to prevent failures, while oversight focuses on detection, remediation, or incentives for future prevention. Building on this, we make three contributions. 1) We propose a framework to align regulatory expectations with what is technically and organizationally plausible, articulating the conditions under which each mechanism is possible, where they fall short, and what is required to make them meaningful in practice. 2) We outline how supervision methods should be documented and integrated into risk management, and drawing on the Microsoft Responsible AI Maturity Model, we outline a maturity model for AI supervision. 3) We explicitly highlight boundaries of these mechanisms, including where they apply, where they fail, and where it is clear that no existing methods suffice. This foregrounds the question of whether meaningful supervision is possible in a given deployment context, and can support regulators, auditors, and practitioners in identifying both present and future limitations.

In this position paper, we argue that human baselines in foundation model evaluations must be more rigorous and more transparent to enable meaningful comparisons of human vs. AI performance, and we provide recommendations and a reporting checklist towards this end. Human performance baselines are vital for the machine learning community, downstream users, and policymakers to interpret AI evaluations. Models are often claimed to achieve "super-human" performance, but existing baselining methods are neither sufficiently rigorous nor sufficiently well-documented to robustly measure and assess performance differences. Based on a meta-review of the measurement theory and AI evaluation literatures, we derive a framework with recommendations for designing, executing, and reporting human baselines. We synthesize our recommendations into a checklist that we use to systematically review 115 human baselines (studies) in foundation model evaluations and thus identify shortcomings in existing baselining methods; our checklist can also assist researchers in conducting human baselines and reporting results. We hope our work can advance more rigorous AI evaluation practices that can better serve both the research community and policymakers. Data is available at: https://github.com/kevinlwei/human-baselines

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are effective for processing graph-structured data but face challenges with large graphs due to high memory requirements and inefficient sparse matrix operations on GPUs. Quantum Computing (QC) offers a promising avenue to address these issues and inspires new algorithmic approaches. In particular, Quantum Graph Neural Networks (QGNNs) have been explored in recent literature. However, current quantum hardware limits the dimension of the data that can be effectively encoded. Existing approaches either simplify datasets manually or use artificial graph datasets. This work introduces the Guided Graph Compression (GGC) framework, which uses a graph autoencoder to reduce both the number of nodes and the dimensionality of node features. The compression is guided to enhance the performance of a downstream classification task, which can be applied either with a quantum or a classical classifier. The framework is evaluated on the Jet Tagging task, a classification problem of fundamental importance in high energy physics that involves distinguishing particle jets initiated by quarks from those by gluons. The GGC is compared against using the autoencoder as a standalone preprocessing step and against a baseline classical GNN classifier. Our numerical results demonstrate that GGC outperforms both alternatives, while also facilitating the testing of novel QGNN ansatzes on realistic datasets.

We propose SPARTA ALIGNMENT, an algorithm to collectively align multiple LLMs through competition and combat. To complement a single model's lack of diversity in generation and biases in evaluation, multiple LLMs form a "sparta tribe" to compete against each other in fulfilling instructions while serving as judges for the competition of others. For each iteration, one instruction and two models are selected for a duel, the other models evaluate the two responses, and their evaluation scores are aggregated through a adapted elo-ranking based reputation system, where winners/losers of combat gain/lose weight in evaluating others. The peer-evaluated combat results then become preference pairs where the winning response is preferred over the losing one, and all models learn from these preferences at the end of each iteration. SPARTA ALIGNMENT enables the self-evolution of multiple LLMs in an iterative and collective competition process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPARTA ALIGNMENT outperforms initial models and 4 self-alignment baselines across 10 out of 12 tasks and datasets with 7.0% average improvement. Further analysis reveals that SPARTA ALIGNMENT generalizes more effectively to unseen tasks and leverages the expertise diversity of participating models to produce more logical, direct and informative outputs.

Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) systems that have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, and are now advancing geospatial analysis and Earth Observation (EO). They promise improved generalization across tasks, scalability, and efficient adaptation with minimal labeled data. However, despite the rapid proliferation of geospatial FMs, their real-world utility and alignment with global sustainability goals remain underexplored. We introduce SustainFM, a comprehensive benchmarking framework grounded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with extremely diverse tasks ranging from asset wealth prediction to environmental hazard detection. This study provides a rigorous, interdisciplinary assessment of geospatial FMs and offers critical insights into their role in attaining sustainability goals. Our findings show: (1) While not universally superior, FMs often outperform traditional approaches across diverse tasks and datasets. (2) Evaluating FMs should go beyond accuracy to include transferability, generalization, and energy efficiency as key criteria for their responsible use. (3) FMs enable scalable, SDG-grounded solutions, offering broad utility for tackling complex sustainability challenges. Critically, we advocate for a paradigm shift from model-centric development to impact-driven deployment, and emphasize metrics such as energy efficiency, robustness to domain shifts, and ethical considerations.

We introduce a novel framework that transforms the resource-intensive (adversarial) prompt optimization problem into an \emph{efficient, amortized inference task}. Our core insight is that pretrained, non-autoregressive generative LLMs, such as Diffusion LLMs, which model the joint distribution over prompt-response pairs, can serve as powerful surrogates for prompt search. This approach enables the direct conditional generation of prompts, effectively replacing costly, per-instance discrete optimization with a small number of parallelizable samples. We provide a probabilistic analysis demonstrating that under mild fidelity assumptions, only a few conditional samples are required to recover high-reward (harmful) prompts. Empirically, we find that the generated prompts are low-perplexity, diverse jailbreaks that exhibit strong transferability to a wide range of black-box target models, including robustly trained and proprietary LLMs. Beyond adversarial prompting, our framework opens new directions for red teaming, automated prompt optimization, and leveraging emerging Flow- and Diffusion-based LLMs.

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