India's workers are training AI robots to take their jobs With a smartphone strapped to her head, Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra films herself slicing mangoes to train artificial intelligence-powered robots to take on household tasks in the future. Earning 250 rupees ($2.6) for one hour of video, her mundane recordings are invaluable for global tech companies teaching machines how to move like humans in the real world. The 25-year-old is one of a growing army of thousands of AI system trainers in the world's most populous country. "Who else will give you 250 rupees an hour just for doing housework?" "I may get a robot myself in the future," she added.

Gradient boosting is widely popular due to its flexibility and predictive accuracy. However, statistical inference and uncertainty quantification for gradient boosting remain challenging and under-explored. We propose a unified framework for statistical inference in gradient boosting regression. Our framework integrates dropout or parallel training with a recently proposed regularization procedure called Boulevard that allows for a central limit theorem (CLT) for boosting. With these enhancements, we surprisingly find that \textit{increasing} the dropout rate and the number of trees grown in parallel at each iteration substantially enhances signal recovery and overall performance. Our resulting algorithms enjoy similar CLTs, which we use to construct built-in confidence intervals, prediction intervals, and rigorous hypothesis tests for assessing variable importance in only $O(nd^2)$ time with the Nyström method. Numerical experiments verify the asymptotic normality and demonstrate that our algorithms perform well, do not require early stopping, interpolate between regularized boosting and random forests, and confirm the validity of their built-in statistical inference procedures.

Diffusion Models have gained significant popularity due to their remarkable capabilities in image generation, albeit at the cost of intensive computation requirement. Meanwhile, despite their widespread deployment in inference services such as Midjourney, concerns about the potential leakage of sensitive information in uploaded user prompts have arisen. Existing solutions either fail to strike an effective balance between utility and efficiency, or lack rigorous privacy guarantees. To bridge this gap, we propose ObCLIP, a plug-and-play safeguard that enables oblivious cloud-device hybrid generation scheme. By oblivious, each input prompt is transformed into a set of semantically similar candidate prompts that differ only in sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, ethnicity).

Accurate, high-resolution ocean forecasting is crucial for maritime operations and environmental monitoring. While traditional numerical models are capable of producing sub-daily, eddy-resolving forecasts, they are computationally intensive and face challenges in maintaining accuracy at fine spatial and temporal scales. In contrast, recent data-driven approaches offer improved computational efficiency and emerging potential, yet typically operate at daily resolution and struggle with sub-daily predictions due to error accumulation over time. We introduce FuXi-Ocean, the first data-driven global ocean forecasting model achieving six-hourly predictions at eddy-resolving 1/12 spatial resolution, reaching depths of up to 1500 meters. The model architecture integrates a context-aware feature extraction module with a predictive network employing stacked attention blocks. The core innovation is the Mixture-of-Time (MoT) module, which adaptively integrates predictions from multiple temporal contexts by learning variable-specific reliability, mitigating cumulative errors in sequential forecasting. Through comprehensive experimental evaluation, FuXi-Ocean demonstrates superior skill in predicting key variables, including temperature, salinity, and currents, across multiple depths.

Existing end-to-end autonomous driving (AD) algorithms typically follow the Imitation Learning (IL) paradigm, which faces challenges such as causal confusion and an open-loop gap. In this work, we propose RAD, a 3DGS-based closed-loop Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for end-to-end Autonomous Driving. By leveraging 3DGS techniques, we construct a photorealistic digital replica of the real physical world, enabling the AD policy to extensively explore the state space and learn to handle out-of-distribution scenarios through large-scale trial and error. To enhance safety, we design specialized rewards to guide the policy in effectively responding to safety-critical events and understanding real-world causal relationships. To better align with human driving behavior, we incorporate IL into RL training as a regularization term. We introduce a closed-loop evaluation benchmark consisting of diverse, previously unseen 3DGS environments. Compared to IL-based methods, RAD achieves stronger performance in most closed-loop metrics, particularly exhibiting a 3 lower collision rate. Abundant closed-loop results are presented in the supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/RAD

Digitizing the physical world into accurate simulation ready virtual environments offers significant opportunities in a variety of fields such as augmented and virtual reality, gaming, and robotics. However, current 3D reconstruction and scene-understanding methods commonly fall short in one or more critical aspects, such as geometry completeness, object interactivity, physical plausibility, photorealistic rendering, or realistic physical properties for reliable dynamic simulation. To address these limitations, we introduce HoloScene, a novel interactive 3D reconstruction framework that simultaneously achieves these requirements. HoloScene leverages a comprehensive interactive scene-graph representation, encoding object geometry, appearance, and physical properties alongside hierarchical and inter-object relationships. Reconstruction is formulated as an energy-based optimization problem, integrating observational data, physical constraints, and generative priors into a unified, coherent objective. Optimization is efficiently performed via a hybrid approach combining sampling-based exploration with gradient-based refinement.

Data augmentation using generative models has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing performance in computer vision tasks. However, most existing augmentation approaches primarily focus on optimizing intrinsic data attributes -- such as fidelity and diversity -- to generate visually high-quality synthetic data, while often neglecting task-specific requirements. Yet, it is essential for data generators to account for the needs of downstream tasks, as training data requirements can vary significantly across different tasks and network architectures. To address these limitations, we propose UtilGen, a novel utility-centric data augmentation framework that adaptively optimizes the data generation process to produce task-specific, high-utility training data via downstream task feedback. Specifically, we first introduce a weight allocation network to evaluate the task-specific utility of each synthetic sample. Guided by these evaluations, UtilGen iteratively refines the data generation process using a dual-level optimization strategy to maximize the synthetic data utility: (1) model-level optimization tailors the generative model to the downstream task, and (2) instance-level optimization adjusts generation policies -- such as prompt embeddings and initial noise -- at each generation round. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets of varying complexity and granularity demonstrate that UtilGen consistently achieves superior performance, with an average accuracy improvement of 3.87\% over previous SOTA. Further analysis of data influence and distribution reveals that UtilGen produces more impactful and task-relevant synthetic data, validating the effectiveness of the paradigm shift from visual characteristics-centric to task utility-centric data augmentation.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speaks during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January. Electronics maker NEC said Thursday that major Japanese financial institutions, including Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and MS&AD Insurance Group Holdings, will participate in its strategic collaboration with U.S. startup Anthropic in the field of artificial intelligence. The partnership aims to improve the quality of financial services for customers using AI and to strengthen measures against cyberattacks. The other companies are Sumitomo Life Insurance, Daiwa Securities Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank and Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance. Using Anthropic's AI technology, the partners will work not only on developing new services but also on improving productivity by streamlining business processes at each company.

The development of reasoning capabilities represents a critical frontier in large language models (LLMs) research, where reinforcement learning (RL) and process reward models (PRMs) have emerged as predominant methodological frameworks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, empirical evidence from DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that pure RL training focused on mathematical problem-solving can progressively enhance reasoning abilities without PRM integration, challenging the perceived necessity of process supervision. In this study, we conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between RL training and PRM capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that problem-solving proficiency and process supervision capabilities represent complementary dimensions of reasoning that co-evolve synergistically during pure RL training. In particular, current PRMs underperform simple baselines like majority voting when applied to state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B. To address this limitation, we propose Self-PRM, an introspective framework in which models autonomously evaluate and rerank their generated solutions through self-reward mechanisms. Although Self-PRM consistently improves the accuracy of the benchmark (particularly with larger sample sizes), analysis exposes persistent challenges: The approach exhibits low precision (<10\%) on difficult problems, frequently misclassifying flawed solutions as valid. These analyses underscore the need for combined training with process supervision and continued RL scaling to enhance reward alignment and introspective accuracy. We hope these findings provide actionable insights for building more reliable and self-aware complex reasoning models.

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass refusals. While this is primarily demonstrated in an English-centric context, appropriate refusal behavior is important for any language, but poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the refusal behavior in LLMs across 14 languages using \textit{PolyRefuse}, a multilingual safety dataset created by translating malicious and benign English prompts into these languages. We uncover the surprising cross-lingual universality of the refusal direction: a vector extracted from English can bypass refusals in other languages with near-perfect effectiveness, without any additional fine-tuning. Even more remarkably, refusal directions derived from any safety-aligned language transfer seamlessly to others. We attribute this transferability to the parallelism of refusal vectors across languages in the embedding space and identify the underlying mechanism behind cross-lingual jailbreaks. These findings provide actionable insights for building more robust multilingual safety defenses and pave the way for a deeper mechanistic understanding of cross-lingual vulnerabilities in LLMs.