We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution p over d symbols, given n i.i.d.

A Border Force officer and his handler who worked for Chinese intelligence in the UK have been jailed. Chi Leung Peter Wai, 40, was sentenced to 10 years and Chung Biu Bill Yuen, 65, given an eight year term after being found guilty of assisting a foreign intelligence service, an offence under the National Security Act. Wai used his position as a Border Force officer to access to the Home Office computer system to track Hong Kong dissidents in the UK, was also convicted of misconduct in public office. The judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told the men that their actions threaten the sovereignty of the state during sentencing remarks at the Old Bailey on Thursday. The dual Chinese-British nationals were found guilty after a trial last month.

Federated learning (FL) is an effective and widely used approach to training deep learning models on decentralized datasets held by distinct clients. FL also strengthens both security and privacy protections for training data. Common challenges associated with statistical heterogeneity between distributed datasets have spurred significant interest in personalized FL (pFL) methods, where models combine aspects of global learning with local modeling specific to each client's unique characteristics. This work investigates the efficacy of theoretically supported, adaptive MMD measures in pFL, primarily focusing on the Ditto framework, a state-ofthe-art technique for distributed data heterogeneity. The use of such measures significantly improves model performance across a variety of tasks, especially those with pronounced feature heterogeneity. Additional experiments demonstrate that such measures are directly applicable to other pFL techniques and yield similar improvements across a number of datasets. Finally, the results motivate the use of constraints tailored to the various kinds of heterogeneity expected in FL systems.

Video generative models can be regarded as world simulators due to their ability to capture dynamic, continuous changes inherent in real-world environments. These models integrate high-dimensional information across visual, temporal, spatial, and causal dimensions, enabling predictions of subjects in various status. A natural and valuable research direction is to explore whether a fully trained video generative model in high-dimensional space can effectively support lowerdimensional tasks such as controllable image generation. In this work, we propose a paradigm for video-to-image knowledge compression and task adaptation, termed Dimension-Reduction Attack (DRA-Ctrl), which utilizes the strengths of video models, including long-range context modeling and flatten full-attention, to perform various generation tasks.

The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is increasingly favored for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently, but it depends on heterogeneous compute and memory resources. These factors jointly affect system Cost, Accuracy, and Performance (CAP), making trade-offs inevitable. Existing benchmarks often fail to capture these trade-offs accurately, complicating practical deployment decisions. To address this, we introduce MoE-CAP, a benchmark specifically designed for MoE systems. Our analysis reveals that achieving an optimal balance across CAP is difficult with current hardware; MoE systems typically optimize two of the three dimensions at the expense of the third--a dynamic we term the MoE-CAP trade-off. To visualize this, we propose the CAP Radar Diagram. We further introduce sparsity-aware performance metrics--Sparse Memory Bandwidth Utilization (S-MBU) and Sparse Model FLOPS Utilization (S-MFU)--to enable accurate performance benchmarking of MoE systems across diverse hardware platforms and deployment scenarios.

What is Lebanon's Beaufort Castle? Why is Israel attacking Nabatieh? Israeli air attacks on southern Lebanon have killed at least three people, Lebanese state media has reported, a day after the United States and Iran signed an interim agreement that called for an end to their war on all fronts, including Lebanon. Lebanon's National News Agency (NNA) reported on Thursday that an Israeli drone attack hit a car near the town of Kfar Tebnit, killing two people. NNA also reported that a strike carried out by an Israeli drone in the town of Beit Yahoun in the Nabatieh governorate wounded two people.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

The company is also previewing an upgraded creative AI studio experience. Earlier this year, Adobe debuted Firefly AI Assistant, an AI agent that could work across its family of Creative Cloud apps to complete multi-step workflows on behalf of users. Today, the company is previewing an updated Firefly creative AI studio experience that expands the capabilities of that software, starting with an upgrade to AI Assistant's ability to carry context forward. A new Elements feature allows users to save characters, locations and objects they've previously generated to reuse in future outputs. Adobe suggests this capability will allow AI Assistant to better maintain consistency across stories, campaigns and projects that evolve inside of Firefly.

Fox's reported $22 billion acquisition of Roku, the leading US streaming platform reaching 100 million homes, is causing consumer anxiety and prompting searches for alternatives. PCWorld notes that while users can expect increased Fox content promotion and targeted advertising through data sharing, concerns about immediate changes may be overblown since the deal won't close until 2027. Alternative platforms like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Google TV each offer different trade-offs in privacy, customization, and cost, but all have their own promotional limitations. Fox is planning to acquire Roku for $22 billion, and a lot of folks are already preparing for the worst. I've already received a half-dozen questions from readers about Roku alternatives to consider.