Industry
US export ban on Anthropic's AI models further strains alliances
Artificial intelligence has become the latest issue to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies after US President Donald Trump ordered tech giant Anthropic to cut off foreign access to its powerful Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 AI models, citing national security concerns. The US issued the unprecedented order for all foreign nationals in and outside the US last week, promoting Anthropic to take the two AI models completely offline to ensure compliance. The two public versions of the model, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, were due to be released in early June. Anthropic said the US government did not provide a reason for the order, but that it was its "understanding" that the Trump administration believed it had become aware of a method of "jailbreaking" Fable 5. The Trump administration's ban immediately sent shockwaves across Europe, which is heavily dependent on US-developed AI.
GSAlign: Geometric and Semantic Alignment Network for Aerial-Ground Person Re-Identification
Aerial-Ground person re-identification (AG-ReID) is an emerging yet challenging task that aims to match pedestrian images captured from drastically different viewpoints, typically from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground-based surveillance cameras. The task poses significant challenges due to extreme viewpoint discrepancies, occlusions, and domain gaps between aerial and ground imagery. While prior works have made progress by learning cross-view representations, they remain limited in handling severe pose variations and spatial misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a Geometric and Semantic Alignment Network (GSAlign) tailored for AG-ReID. GSAlign introduces two key components to jointly tackle geometric distortion and semantic misalignment in aerial-ground matching: a Learnable Thin Plate Spline (LTPS) Module and a Dynamic Alignment Module (DAM). The LTPS module adaptively warps pedestrian features based on a set of learned keypoints, effectively compensating for geometric variations caused by extreme viewpoint changes.
Sparse Meets Dense: Unified Generative Recommendations with Cascaded Sparse-Dense Representations
Generative models have recently gained attention in recommendation systems by directly predicting item identifiers from user interaction sequences. However, existing methods suffer from significant information loss due to the separation of stages such as quantization and sequence modeling, hindering their ability to achieve the modeling precision and accuracy of sequential dense retrieval techniques. Integrating generative and dense retrieval methods remains a critical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Cascaded Organized Bi-Represented generAtive retrieval (COBRA) framework, which innovatively integrates sparse semantic IDs and dense vectors through a cascading process. Our method alternates between generating these representations by first generating sparse IDs, which serve as conditions to aid in the generation of dense vectors. End-to-end training enables dynamic refinement of dense representations, capturing both semantic insights and collaborative signals from user-item interactions. During inference, COBRA employs a coarse-to-fine strategy, starting with sparse ID generation and refining them into dense vectors via the generative model. We further propose BeamFusion, an innovative approach combining beam search with nearest neighbor scores to enhance inference flexibility and recommendation diversity.
The inevitable weakness of metrics
Quantifying our lives is easier than it's ever been. But a philosopher of games warns that external metrics and data can never capture what's truly important. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I initially started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires.
Brain-computer interface trials are taking off
This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell --a man with ALS who is "the first power user" of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paralyzed and unable to speak coherently without the device. He has now spent almost three years using a brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables him to "speak," surf the web, and perform his job as a climate activist, largely independently. Since Harrell was implanted with the device, in July 2023, a team at the University of California, Davis, has worked with him to adjust and improve its offerings. They've refined its accuracy, for example.
Rethinking Protein Protein Interaction Prediction from Pairs to Graphs
Deep learning-based computational methods have achieved promising results in predicting protein-protein interactions (PPIs). However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on isolated pairwise evaluations, overlooking a model's capability to reconstruct biologically meaningful PPI networks, which is crucial for biology research. To address this gap, we introduce PRING, the first comprehensive benchmark that evaluates PRotein-protein INteraction prediction from a Graph-level perspective. PRINGcurates a high-quality, multi-species PPI network dataset comprising 21,484 proteins and 186,818 interactions, with well-designed strategies to address both data redundancy and leakage. Building on this golden-standard dataset, we establish two complementary evaluation paradigms: (1) topologyoriented tasks, which assess intra and cross-species PPI network construction, and (2) function-oriented tasks, including protein complex pathway prediction, GO module analysis, and essential protein justification. These evaluations not only reflect the model's capability to understand the network topology but also facilitate protein function annotation, biological module detection, and even disease mechanism analysis. Extensive experiments on four representative model categories, consisting of sequence similarity-based, naive sequence-based, protein language model-based, and structure-based approaches, demonstrate that current PPI models have potential limitations in recovering both structural and functional properties of PPI networks, highlighting the gap in supporting real-world biological applications. We believe PRINGprovides a reliable platform to guide the development of more effective PPI prediction models for the community.
Beyond the Surface: Enhancing LLM-as-a-Judge Alignment with Human via Internal Representations
The growing scale of evaluation tasks has led to the widespread adoption of automated evaluation using LLMs, a paradigm known as "LLM-as-a-judge". However, improving its alignment with human preferences without complex prompts or finetuning remains challenging. Previous studies mainly optimize based on shallow outputs, overlooking rich cross-layer representations. In this work, motivated by preliminary findings that middle-to-upper layers encode semantically and taskrelevant representations that are often more aligned with human judgments than the final layer, we propose LAGER, a post-hoc, plug-and-play framework for improving the alignment of LLM-as-a-Judge point-wise evaluations with human scores, by leveraging internal representations.
Multi-Modal View Enhanced Large Vision Models for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Time series, typically represented as numerical sequences, can also be transformed into images and texts, offering multi-modal views (MMVs) of the same underlying signal. These MMVs can reveal complementary patterns and enable the use of powerful pre-trained large models, such as large vision models (LVMs), for long-term time series forecasting (LTSF). However, as we identified in this work, the state-ofthe-art (SOTA) LVM-based forecaster poses an inductive bias towards "forecasting periods". To harness this bias, we propose DMMV, a novel decomposition-based multi-modal view framework that leverages trend-seasonal decomposition and a novel backcast-residual based adaptive decomposition to integrate MMVs for LTSF. Comparative evaluations against 14 SOTA models across diverse datasets show that DMMV outperforms single-view and existing multi-modal baselines, achieving the best mean squared error (MSE) on 6 out of 8 benchmark datasets. The code for this paper is available at: https://github.com/D2I-Group/dmmv.