Industry
For 26, you can get lifetime licenses to Microsoft Office and Windows 11 Pro
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Older PCs need two things to still be useful: an updated operating system and software they can actually run. Between Windows 10 and Microsoft 365, you have an outdated OS and apps you're paying for every month that aren't even optimized for your machine. If you want a simple alternative, you can now get Windows 11 Pro and a lifetime license for Microsoft Office 2019 together for only $25.99 (reg. This bundle gives you both pieces at once.
Lifetime VPN deal: 39.99, one payment, 15 devices
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. A FastestVPN Pro lifetime subscription for 15 devices is now $39.99 (MSRP $600). Your internet activity is more exposed than you think. Whether you're shopping online, streaming movies, or sending sensitive emails, unprotected data is like an open invitation to hackers, trackers, and creepers. But FastestVPN Pro can help.
To stay or risk the 'Road of Death' - Ukrainian civilians trapped in frontline city
To stay or risk the'Road of Death' - Ukrainian civilians trapped in frontline city So, we're stuck here, says Ludmilla, over the phone from the rooftop of a fire-damaged house in southern Ukraine. People are trying their best to survive. Her frontline home city of Oleshky has, according to multiple accounts, been largely cut off from fresh supplies of food or medicine for months. Ludmilla describes being trapped there, and watching it decaying before her eyes. Ukraine's commissioner for human rights has warned of a humanitarian crisis.
Apple to pay 250m to iPhone buyers over AI features lawsuit
Apple has agreed to pay some iPhone buyers a collective $250m (£184m) to end a lawsuit accusing the company of misleading people about new artificial intelligence (AI) features and capabilities. In a settlement filed Tuesday in California federal court, Apple did not admit any wrongdoing, but agreed to a deal that will resolve claims in a large consolidated class action lawsuit filed last year. It accused Apple of false advertising around its AI features on the iPhone, which the company called Apple Intelligence, including an enhancement of its Siri voice assistant. Apple will pay between $25 and $95 to people who bought an iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 between June 2024 and March 2025. An Apple spokeswoman said the lawsuit was focused on the availability of two additional features in a lineup of many released as part of its Apple Intelligence rollout.
SOC-ICNN: From Polyhedral to Conic Geometry for Learning Convex Surrogate Functions
Liu, Kang, Hu, Jianchen, Peng, Wei
Classical ReLU-based Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) are equivalent to the optimal value functions of Linear Programming (LP). This intrinsic structural equivalence restricts their representational capacity to piecewise-linear polyhedral functions. To overcome this representational bottleneck, we propose the SOC-ICNN, an architecture that generalizes the underlying optimization class from LP to Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP). By explicitly injecting positive semi-definite curvature and Euclidean norm-based conic primitives, our formulation introduces native smooth curvature into the representation while preserving a rigorous optimization-theoretic interpretation. We formally prove that SOC-ICNNs strictly expand the representational space of ReLU-ICNNs without increasing the asymptotic order of forward-pass complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOC-ICNN substantially improves function approximation, while delivering competitive downstream decision quality. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SOC-ICNN-4B18/.
Adaptive Confidence Intervals in Efron's Gaussian Two-Groups Model
Wang, Qiaosen, Chai, Shuwen, Gao, Chao
Robust uncertainty quantification is increasingly important in modern data analysis and is often formalized under Huber's model, which allows an $\varepsilon$-fraction of arbitrary corruptions. In many experimental sciences, however, the measurement protocol is well controlled, and contamination is more plausibly introduced upstream. Motivated by this noise-oblivious nature of adversaries, we study confidence intervals for the null location parameter $θ$ in Efron's Gaussian two-groups model, where an unknown fraction $\varepsilon$ of observations have arbitrarily shifted means, but all samples share the same law of additive Gaussian measurement noise with variance $σ^2$. We characterize the minimax-optimal length among confidence intervals with a prescribed coverage level uniformly over the unknown contamination proportion and all noise-oblivious adversaries. Although prior work has shown that the minimax point estimation rate of theta does not deteriorate when $\varepsilon$ becomes unknown, our results reveal that, with a given $σ^2$, the minimax-optimal length of confidence intervals that are adaptive to unknown $\varepsilon$ is of order $σ(n^{-1/4}+\varepsilon^{1/2}/\max\{1, \log(en \varepsilon^2)\}^{1/2})$, which is polynomially worse than the optimal length when $\varepsilon$ is known. When the variance $σ^2$ is also unknown, we show a further degradation: no adaptive confidence interval can be shorter than $Ω(σn^{-1/8})$. Algorithmically, we introduce a Fourier-based certification procedure built on Carathéodory's positive-semidefiniteness constraints. By scanning candidate points and accepting those whose residual characteristic function is certifiably consistent with a Gaussian location mixture, our algorithm attains the minimax lower bound in the known-variance setting and is computable in polynomial time.
Analysis and Explainability of LLMs Via Evolutionary Methods
Gallagher, Shannon K., Rallapalli, Swati, Brooks, Tyler, Loughin, Chuck, Sezgin, Michele, Yurko, Ronald
Evolutionary methods have long been useful for analysis and explanation in genetics, biology, ecology, and related fields. In this work, we extend these methods to neural networks, specifically large language models (LLMs), to better analyze and explain relationships among models. We show how relating weights to genotypes and output text to phenotypes can improve our understanding of model lineage, important datasets, the roles of different model layers, and visualization of model relationships. We demonstrate this in a controlled experiment, where our estimated evolutionary trees reliably recover the topology of the ground-truth training tree. We further identify the most important weight layers according to weight differences and show through phenotypic experiments that one training dataset appears to contribute more useful information than the others. Finally, we generate an unsupervised evolutionary tree of black-box foundation models. Throughout, we provide visualizations that support a clearer understanding of evolutionary relationships among LLMs.
Disease Is a Spectral Perturbation
Mayfield, John D., Rosen, Matthew S.
We propose a novel method of understanding disease transformation from a healthy baseline with biomarker-level explainability. By modeling the biomarker covariance matrices of healthy controls and disease states, the perturbation can be individually characterized to accomplish mechanistic explanations of disease trajectories, both at a molecular level and for individual patients. Given a cohort of n patients each measured on p biomarkers, we define the biomarker "Hamiltonian" H = X^T X / n \in R^{p \times p}, where X \in R^{n \times p} is the covariant biomarker matrix. The eigenvectors of H define a set of normal modes of biomarker coordination, and the eigenvalues quantify the energy carried by each mode. In the healthy state, the reference Hamiltonian H_0 governs this structure where disease perturbs H_0 by an additive operator ΔH, thus shifting eigenvalues and rotating eigenvectors in proportion to the severity of pathological disruption. We formalize this framework, derive the spectral change given a disease perturbation, and demonstrate that the projection of a newly diagnosed patient's cumulative biomarker covariance structure onto disease-discriminant eigenmodes constitutes an optimal prognostic statistic for greater precision in disease prognosis. This work serves as a veritable white paper with application across a panoply of disease frameworks from cancer to neurodegenerative disorders.
ISAAC: Auditing Causal Reasoning in Deep Models for Drug-Target Interaction
Tarantino, Barbara, Kim, Sun, Lu, Yijingxiu, Giudici, Paolo
Deep learning models for drug--target interaction (DTI) prediction often achieve strong benchmark performance without necessarily relying on mechanistically meaningful molecular features, a limitation that standard accuracy-based evaluation cannot detect. We introduce ISAAC (Intervention-based Structural Auditing Approach for Causal Reasoning), a post-hoc framework that evaluates prior-relative structural sensitivity by probing frozen models through matched mechanistic and spurious input-level interventions, independently of predictive accuracy. Applied to three sequence-based DTI architectures on the Davis benchmark, ISAAC reveals approximately 25\% relative differences in reasoning scores across models with comparable AUROC (within around 3\%), stable across training and intervention seeds and two distinct perturbation operators. These discrepancies, undetectable under conventional accuracy metrics, motivate the use of post-hoc structural auditing as a complement to standard performance evaluation in scientific machine learning for molecular modeling.