Media
Chemistry Nobel Prize awarded to trio in field of metal organic frameworks
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks (MOF). The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or break down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment. "Metal organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. According to Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, the new form of molecular architecture can be compared with the handbag of the fictional Harry Potter character Hermione Granger: small on the outside but very large on the inside.
Virtual Jesus? People of faith divided as AI enters religion
The Text With Jesus chatbot app displayed on an iPhone on Oct. 2. | AFP-JIJI New York - Artificial intelligence, the technology upending nearly every corner of society, is creeping into religion, serving up virtual Jesus and automated sermons -- a change drawing mixed reviews from the faithful. Religious chatbots and other faith-based digital tools are growing in number, offering counsel, comfort and spiritual guidance during an age of rapidly transforming socialization and engagement. One app, which is called Text with Jesus, has thousands of paying subscribers. It lets people ostensibly ask questions of Mary, Joseph, Jesus and nearly all 12 apostles. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
AVerImaTeC: A Dataset for Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims with Evidence from the Web
Cao, Rui, Ding, Zifeng, Guo, Zhijiang, Schlichtkrull, Michael, Vlachos, Andreas
Textual claims are often accompanied by images to enhance their credibility and spread on social media, but this also raises concerns about the spread of misinformation. Existing datasets for automated verification of image-text claims remain limited, as they often consist of synthetic claims and lack evidence annotations to capture the reasoning behind the verdict. In this work, we introduce AVerImaTeC, a dataset consisting of 1,297 real-world image-text claims. Each claim is annotated with question-answer (QA) pairs containing evidence from the web, reflecting a decomposed reasoning regarding the verdict. We mitigate common challenges in fact-checking datasets such as contextual dependence, temporal leakage, and evidence insufficiency, via claim normalization, temporally constrained evidence annotation, and a two-stage sufficiency check. We assess the consistency of the annotation in AVerImaTeC via inter-annotator studies, achieving a $ฮบ=0.742$ on verdicts and $74.7\%$ consistency on QA pairs. We also propose a novel evaluation method for evidence retrieval and conduct extensive experiments to establish baselines for verifying image-text claims using open-web evidence.
Unifying Autoregressive and Diffusion-Based Sequence Generation
Fathi, Nima, Scholak, Torsten, Noรซl, Pierre-Andrรฉ
We present significant extensions to diffusion-based sequence generation models, blurring the line with autoregressive language models. We introduce hyperschedules, which assign distinct noise schedules to individual token positions, generalizing both autoregressive models (e.g., GPT) and conventional diffusion models (e.g., SEDD, MDLM) as special cases. Second, we propose two hybrid token-wise noising processes that interpolate between absorbing and uniform processes, enabling the model to fix past mistakes, and we introduce a novel inference algorithm that leverages this new feature in a simplified context inspired from MDLM. To support efficient training and inference, we design attention masks compatible with KV-caching. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art perplexity and generate diverse, high-quality sequences across standard benchmarks, suggesting a promising path for autoregressive diffusion-based sequence generation. See code and resources at https://hdlm-colm.github.io/
Ads that Talk Back: Implications and Perceptions of Injecting Personalized Advertising into LLM Chatbots
Tang, Brian Jay, Sun, Kaiwen, Curran, Noah T., Schaub, Florian, Shin, Kang G.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the creation of highly effective chatbots. However, the compute costs of widely deploying LLMs have raised questions about profitability. Companies have proposed exploring ad-based revenue streams for monetizing LLMs, which could serve as the new de facto platform for advertising. This paper investigates the implications of personalizing LLM advertisements to individual users via a between-subjects experiment with 179 participants. We developed a chatbot that embeds personalized product advertisements within LLM responses, inspired by similar forays by AI companies. The evaluation of our benchmarks showed that ad injection only slightly impacted LLM performance, particularly response desirability. Results revealed that participants struggled to detect ads, and even preferred LLM responses with hidden advertisements. Rather than clicking on our advertising disclosure, participants tried changing their advertising settings using natural language queries. We created an advertising dataset and an open-source LLM, Phi-4-Ads, fine-tuned to serve ads and flexibly adapt to user preferences.
Modulation Discovery with Differentiable Digital Signal Processing
Mitcheltree, Christopher, Tan, Hao Hao, Reiss, Joshua D.
Modulations are a critical part of sound design and music production, enabling the creation of complex and evolving audio. Modern synthesizers provide envelopes, low frequency oscillators (LFOs), and more parameter automation tools that allow users to modulate the output with ease. However, determining the modulation signals used to create a sound is difficult, and existing sound-matching / parameter estimation systems are often uninterpretable black boxes or predict high-dimensional framewise parameter values without considering the shape, structure, and routing of the underlying modulation curves. We propose a neural sound-matching approach that leverages modulation extraction, constrained control signal parameterizations, and differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) to discover the modulations present in a sound. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on highly modulated synthetic and real audio samples, its applicability to different DDSP synth architectures, and investigate the trade-off it incurs between interpretability and sound-matching accuracy. We make our code and audio samples available and provide the trained DDSP synths in a VST plugin.