Learning effective policies for adaptive data acquisition remains challenging: posterior-based methods rely on surrogate models and posterior approximations that can be misspecified or biased, while direct policy-learning methods map from historical observations and fail to exploit available model representations, making learning harder. We introduce policy learning with belief representations (POLAR), based on the insight that optimal data acquisition depends on the observation history only through a sufficient belief state. Specifically, POLAR decouples representation learning from policy learning by leveraging pretrained predictive foundation models as belief-state encoders, training a policy head on top of their representations. This yields a simple, unified amortised policy learning framework for Bayesian experimental design, Bayesian optimisation, and active learning, differing only in the task-specific utility used to train the policy. Empirically, we find that POLAR outperforms state-of-the-art amortised methods across diverse tasks while requiring far fewer training samples, demonstrating a significant step in the scalability and efficiency of amortised data acquisition.

Indie movie fans are upset about Google DeepMind's $75 million investment in the studio, which comes as AI companies are deepening their influence in Hollywood. Backrooms, the recent horror movie mega-hit, is a film replete with ideas about repetition and degradation. Its central theme--the horror of a world that seems to be mindlessly, monstrously, ripping off our own--was regarded in some circles as a critique of generative AI . The idea has clearly struck a nerve. Recently passing $300 million at the global box office, has become the biggest hit yet for its buzzy boutique producer and distributor, the New York company A24.

OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled the design for Jalapeño, their first jointly-made chip. The pair of companies announced plans to collaborate on a making a custom AI accelerator in October 2025. In its blog post today, OpenAI called Jalapeño its first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI's vision for the future of LLM inference. In other words, the processor is designed to run its large language models. The AI company claims that so far, Jalapeño is offering performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art in chip technology.

Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot may require some users to upload government-issued ID, passport, or driver's license starting July 8th for account verification. PCWorld reports this identity verification aims to prevent fraud and ensure terms of service compliance, handled by third-party service Persona. Similar ID verification policies by Discord, Reddit, and ChatGPT previously faced significant user backlash over privacy concerns. Anthropic has updated its privacy policy for its AI chatbot Claude. Starting July 8th, the company may--in certain situations--require users to verify their age or identity by uploading a copy of a government-issued ID card, passport, or driving license, reports TechCrunch .

Survival analysis is central to clinical decision-making, yet reliable time-to-event models require large, diverse cohorts that are rarely available at a single institution, while privacy regulations restrict the centralization of patient data. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative by training shared models without exchanging raw data, but its effectiveness for survival modeling under realistic, heterogeneous conditions remains insufficiently understood. This paper presents a systematic, multi-model evaluation of federated survival analysis on a cross-institutional breast cancer cohort with naturally heterogeneous distributed clients. Three representative survival models, the Cox Proportional Hazards model, DeepSurv, and Random Survival Forest (RSF), are compared across centralized, local, and federated training, and three federated optimization strategies (FedAvg, FedProx, and FedAdam) are assessed for the gradient-based models. Results show that FL consistently outperforms local training and approaches, and occasionally exceeds, centralized performance, while RSF offers the best overall balance of discrimination, calibration, and robustness across heterogeneous clients. We further find that performance depends on the diversity of client distributions, and that FedAvg and FedProx are stronger and more stable than FedAdam. Based on these findings, we derive practical, decision-oriented guidelines mapping data, privacy, interpretability, and resource constraints to recommended model and training-paradigm choices for federated survival modeling in healthcare.

As the era of autonomous agents making decisions on behalf of users unfolds, ensuring contextual integrity (CI) - what is the appropriate information to share while carrying out a certain task - becomes a central question to the field. We posit that CI demands a form of reasoning where the agent needs to reason about the context in which it is operating. To test this, we first prompt LLMs to reason explicitly about CI when deciding what information to disclose. We then extend this approach by developing a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that further instills in models the reasoning necessary to achieve CI. Using a synthetic, automatically created, dataset of only 700 examples but with diverse contexts and information disclosure norms, we show that our method substantially reduces inappropriate information disclosure while maintaining task performance across multiple model sizes and families. Importantly, improvements transfer from this synthetic dataset to established CI benchmarks such as PrivacyLens that has human annotations and evaluates privacy leakage of AI assistants in actions and tool calls. Our code is available at: https://github.com/EricGLan/CI-RL

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) derive their capabilities from extensive training on vast corpora of visual and textual data.

Multimodal recommendation aims to integrate collaborative signals with heterogeneous content such as visual and textual information, but remains challenged by modality-specific noise, semantic inconsistency, and unstable propagation over user-item graphs. These issues are often exacerbated by naive fusion or shallow modeling strategies, leading to degraded generalization and poor robustness. While recent work has explored the frequency domain as a lens to separate stable from noisy signals, most methods rely on static filtering or reweighting, lacking the ability to reason over spectral structure or adapt to modality-specific reliability. To address these challenges, we propose a Structured Spectral Reasoning (SSR) framework for frequency-aware multimodal recommendation. Our method follows a four-stage pipeline: (i) Decompose graph-based multimodal signals into spectral bands via graph-guided transformations to isolate semantic granularity; (ii) Modulate band-level reliability with spectral band masking, a training-time masking with representation-consistency objective that suppresses brittle frequency components; (iii) Fuse complementary frequency cues using hyperspectral reasoning with low-rank cross-band interaction; and (iv) Align modality-specific spectral features via contrastive regularization to promote semantic and structural consistency. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, particularly under sparse and cold-start settings. Additional analyses indicate that structured spectral modeling improves robustness and provides clearer diagnostics of how different bands contribute to performance. The code is available at https://github.com/llm-ml/SSR.git.

Recent large-scale reasoning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical benchmarks, yet the internal mechanisms underlying their success remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce the notion of a reasoning graph, extracted by clustering hidden-state representations at each reasoning step, and systematically analyze three key graph-theoretic properties: cyclicity, diameter, and small-world index, across multiple tasks (GSM8K, MATH500, AIME 2024). Our findings reveal that distilled reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeekR1-Distill-Qwen-32B) exhibit significantly more recurrent cycles (about 5 per sample), substantially larger graph diameters, and pronounced small-world characteristics (about 6x) compared to their base counterparts. Notably, these structural advantages grow with task difficulty and model capacity, with cycle detection peaking at the 14B scale and exploration diameter maximized in the 32B variant, correlating positively with accuracy. Furthermore, we show that supervised fine-tuning on an improved dataset systematically expands reasoning graph diameters in tandem with performance gains, offering concrete guidelines for dataset design aimed at boosting reasoning capabilities.

Compilers, while essential, are notoriously complex systems that demand prohibitively expensive human expertise to develop and maintain. The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a compelling new paradigm: Neural Compilation, which could potentially simplify compiler development for new architectures and facilitate the discovery of innovative optimization techniques. However, several critical obstacles impede its practical adoption. Firstly, a significant lack of dedicated benchmarks and robust evaluation methodologies hinders objective assessment and tracking of progress in the field. Secondly, systematically enhancing the reliability and performance of LLM-generated assembly remains a critical challenge.