Nine people have been killed and dozens more wounded in a Russian attack on the western city of Ternopil, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky has said. Nine-storey blocks of flats were hit in the strikes, as Russia fired more than 470 drones and 47 missiles at Ukraine overnight in a brazen attack, Zelensky said. Three districts of Ukraine's second city, Kharkiv, were also hit by a massive drone attack which injured more than 30 people, including children. Photos posted online showed buildings and cars ablaze. Power cuts are affecting a number of regions across the country, Ukraine's energy ministry said.

China's public is far more trusting of artificial intelligence than their peers in the United States and other Western countries, a survey has found. In China, 87 percent of people said they trusted AI, compared with 67 percent in Brazil, 32 percent in the US, 36 percent in the United Kingdom, and 39 percent in Germany, the Edelman poll released on Tuesday showed. Only one-third of Americans said they expected AI to reduce poverty and polarisation, though half predicted a positive impact on climate-related challenges. While 54 percent of Chinese said they embraced greater use of AI, just 17 percent of Americans answered the same, according to the survey. Trust was highest among young people, though still much lower in Western countries.

The increasing popularity of online two-sided markets such as ride-sharing, accommodation and freelance labor platforms, goes hand in hand with new socioeconomic challenges. One major issue remains the existence of bias and discrimination against certain social groups.

AI startup Anthropic's recent announcement that it detected the world's first artificial intelligence-led hacking campaign has prompted a multitude of responses from cybersecurity experts. In a report on Friday, Anthropic said its assistant Claude Code was manipulated to carry out 80-90 percent of a "large-scale" and "highly sophisticated" cyberattack, with human intervention required "only sporadically". Anthropic, the creator of the popular Claude chatbot, said the attack aimed to infiltrate government agencies, financial institutions, tech firms and chemical manufacturing companies, though the operation was only successful in a small number of cases. The San Francisco-based company, which attributed the attack to Chinese state-sponsored hackers, did not specify how it had uncovered the operation, nor identify the "roughly" 30 entities that it said had been targeted. Roman V Yampolskiy, an AI and cybersecurity expert at the University of Louisville, said there was no doubt that AI-assisted hacking posed a serious threat, though it was difficult to verify the precise details of Anthropic's account.

Learning meaningful and compact representations with disentangled semantic aspects is considered to be of key importance in representation learning.

Ahmadian et al. [2020] established the study of fairness in hierarchical

We provide the first convergence guarantee for black-box variational inference (BBVI) with the reparameterization gradient. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI ( e.g., bounded domain, bounded support, only optimizing for the scale, and such), our setup does not need any such algorithmic modifications. Our results hold for log-smooth posterior densities with and without strong log-concavity and the location-scale variational family. Notably, our analysis reveals that certain algorithm design choices commonly employed in practice, such as nonlinear parameterizations of the scale matrix, can result in suboptimal convergence rates. Fortunately, running BBVI with proximal stochastic gradient descent fixes these limitations and thus achieves the strongest known convergence guarantees. We evaluate this theoretical insight by comparing proximal SGD against other standard implementations of BBVI on large-scale Bayesian inference problems.