Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Low-rank matrix approximation (LRMA) methods have achieved excellent accuracy among today's collaborative filtering (CF) methods.

A surrealist painting from the 1940s by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) - shattering the auction record for an artwork by a female artist. The painting went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the Sotheby's auction house. The auction also broke the previous record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021. The work - titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The bed) - depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite. It marks one of the Mexican artist's most psychologically charged self portraits, Sotheby's said, and was painted during a turbulent chapter in Kahlo's life - the year her former lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.

Scientists reveal what triggered Santorini'earthquake swarm' The swarm of tens of thousands of earthquakes near the Greek island of Santorini earlier this year was triggered by molten rock pumping through an underground channel over three months, scientists have discovered. They used physics and artificial intelligence to work out exactly what caused the more than 25,000 earthquakes, which travelled about 20km (12 miles) horizontally through the Earth's crust. They used each of the tremors as virtual sensors, then used artificial intelligence to analyse patterns associated with them. One of the lead researchers, Dr Stephen Hicks from UCL, said combining physics and machine learning in this way could help forecast volcanic eruptions. The seismic activity started to stir beneath the Greek islands of Santorini, Amorgos, and Anafi in January 2025.

Japanese and South Korean tech stocks tumbled Friday, with Softbank falling over 10% amid AI bubble concerns. HONG KONG - Japanese and South Korean tech stocks plummeted on Friday, with tech investor SoftBank plunging more than 10% as fears over an AI bubble weighed on the market. The selling followed a downbeat session on Wall Street after U.S. jobs data clouded hopes of further interest rate cuts and fears about whether red-hot valuations for artificial intelligence shares are justified. Seoul's benchmark Kospi index was trading down nearly 4%, while Tokyo's Nikkei index shed 2.3% in morning trade. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

President Vladimir Putin claims his health is "fine" after a two-day medical check-up in Moscow, despite persistent rumors about his health.

Defiant Dems receive 24/7 protection from Capitol Police after Trump accused them of'seditious behavior' and threatened them with execution What Meghan's announcements in her pseudo-Royal court get wrong and why they'speak volumes', revealed by experts Presidential hopeful is dragged into criminal probe... as shock texts emerge: 'It will open Pandora's Box' Multiple cast members speak to Daily Mail and hurl ugly allegations at each other... and reveal co-stars they can't stand Family panic as Britney Spears takes'disturbing' measures... after world was shocked by her unrecognizable new look Everybody Loves Raymond stars now unrecognizable as they reunite for sitcom's 30th anniversary Democratic candidate gives bizarre defense after comments that she'hates' Nashville resurface Private school where teacher'had sex with five students as soon as they turned 16' - and it was LEGAL Kansas City Chiefs coach slams Donald Trump in brutal putdown: 'He has no idea what's going on' Anna Kepner's ex-boyfriend claims stepbrother'climbed on top of her' months before cheerleader was found dead on cruise Bruce Willis' daughter Rumer makes heartbreaking confession about famous father's dementia battle Truth about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo's'secret marriage'... and the depressing reason insiders say their friendship could soon be OVER America's most forgiving wife lists enormous $6m NYC apartment she shares with disgraced CEO caught with woman on Coldplay kisscam Kessler twins who worked with Frank Sinatra and wowed Elvis Presley'paid a lot of money' to die together at 89 A lion's roar is undeniably one of the most fearsome sounds across the entire animal kingdom. Now, it turns out these majestic creatures produce not just one, but two distinct types of roar. That's according to researchers from the University of Exeter, who have identified a brand new type of growl in African lions. The animals - often referred to as the'King of the Jungle' - are best known for their full-throated roar, an immensely powerful vocalization that can be heard up to five miles away. However, using AI, the researchers were able to identify a second type of roar, which they've called the'intermediary roar'.

Music Recommender Systems (MRS) have long relied on an information-retrieval framing, where progress is measured mainly through accuracy on retrieval-oriented subtasks. While effective, this reductionist paradigm struggles to address the deeper question of what makes a good recommendation, and attempts to broaden evaluation, through user studies or fairness analyses, have had limited impact. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) disrupts this framework: LLMs are generative rather than ranking-based, making standard accuracy metrics questionable. They also introduce challenges such as hallucinations, knowledge cutoffs, non-determinism, and opaque training data, rendering traditional train/test protocols difficult to interpret. At the same time, LLMs create new opportunities, enabling natural-language interaction and even allowing models to act as evaluators. This work argues that the shift toward LLM-driven MRS requires rethinking evaluation. We first review how LLMs reshape user modeling, item modeling, and natural-language recommendation in music. We then examine evaluation practices from NLP, highlighting methodologies and open challenges relevant to MRS. Finally, we synthesize insights-focusing on how LLM prompting applies to MRS, to outline a structured set of success and risk dimensions. Our goal is to provide the MRS community with an updated, pedagogical, and cross-disciplinary perspective on evaluation.

This study explored whether supervised machine learning and deep learning models can effectively distinguish perceived lower-quality news articles from perceived higher-quality news articles. 3 machine learning classifiers and 3 deep learning models were assessed using a newly created dataset of 1,412,272 English news articles from the Common Crawl over 2018-2024. Expert consensus ratings on 579 source websites were split at the median, creating perceived low and high-quality classes of about 706,000 articles each, with 194 linguistic features per website-level labelled article. Traditional machine learning classifiers such as the Random Forest demonstrated capable performance (0.7355 accuracy, 0.8131 ROC AUC). For deep learning, ModernBERT-large (256 context length) achieved the best performance (0.8744 accuracy; 0.9593 ROC-AUC; 0.8739 F1), followed by DistilBERT-base (512 context length) at 0.8685 accuracy and 0.9554 ROC-AUC. DistilBERT-base (256 context length) reached 0.8478 accuracy and 0.9407 ROC-AUC, while ModernBERT-base (256 context length) attained 0.8569 accuracy and 0.9470 ROC-AUC. These results suggest that the perceived quality of worldwide news articles can be effectively differentiated by traditional CPU-based machine learning classifiers and deep learning classifiers.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We extend Latent Dirichlet Allocation to embedding spaces and derive the SAE objective as a maximum a posteriori estimator under this model. This view implies SAE features are thematic components rather than steerable directions. Based on this, we introduce SAE-TM, a topic modeling framework that: (1) trains an SAE to learn reusable topic atoms, (2) interprets them as word distributions on downstream data, and (3) merges them into any number of topics without retraining. SAE-TM yields more coherent topics than strong baselines on text and image datasets while maintaining diversity. Finally, we analyze thematic structure in image datasets and trace topic changes over time in Japanese woodblock prints. Our work positions SAEs as effective tools for large-scale thematic analysis across modalities. Code and data will be released upon publication.