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Who will win the World Cup? Mathematician's 11 models predict four possible champions (but NOT England!)

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Embattled Gavin Newsom's stunning confession to Justin Trudeau caught on camera at World Cup when he thought no one was watching Secret list of celebrities attending billionaire Peter Thiel's invite-only society where elites learn about sex, cults and the next world war Malia and Sasha Obama steal the show during rare family outing for grand opening of dad Barack's library Haunting final video of beloved Bay Area coffee shop owner, 52, who vanished without a trace: Investigator reveals'unnerving' new clues found inside her home Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Tragic final moments of Hollywood legend's daughter and her husband revealed before being mysteriously found dead in their running SUV Ivanka Trump's youngest son, 8, spotted in middle of Knicks victory parade Scientists create first-ever'map' of female pleasure center that's confused men for centuries All my friends are suddenly getting divorced. Mid-life wives share taboo sex confessions about why they really leave... including common position that made one hate her husband: JANA HOCKING Taylor Swift's bottomless thirst for attention, her greed and sheer tackiness are now truly unbearable... this latest stunt has shown her true colors: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Mystery surrounds JD Vance's dash to Switzerland as world holds breath for Iranians to confirm peace deal Male Israeli hostage sexually assaulted by Hamas captor describes multiple attacks he suffered - blindfolded and stripped naked at knifepoint... and'brutal' 20-minute ordeal Boy, three, is thrown into crocodile enclosure at zoo: Man, 30, 'not known to him' arrested on suspicion of attempted murder Infection found in wildlife evolved to spread between humans, experts fear... after two clusters are identified Florida man hailed as a hero for jumping off of his bike to wrangle a dangerous 8-foot python... only to then be slapped with a $180 FINE Sensational REAL reason Jelly Roll is divorcing Bunnie XO: Insiders reveal'preacher's wife' bombshell that's the talk of Nashville... truth about legendary rocker cuckolding rumor... and G-string mishap Who will win the World Cup? Mathematician's 11 models predict four possible champions (but NOT England!) READ MORE: Supercomputer predicts England's World Cup journey England's World Cup journey begins tonight, but a mathematician warns that fans shouldn't get their hopes up. Dr Ari Joury, a particle physicist and founder of AI firm Wangari, created 11 different models to predict who will win this year's tournament. These digital tipsters crowned four different champions between them, but not a single one picked England. Seven models backed Spain, two singled out Argentina as the likeliest winner, while France and the Netherlands were each the favourite of one prediction system.


Text-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model with Joint Segmentation Decoders

Neural Information Processing Systems

The introduction of generative models has significantly advanced image superresolution (SR) in handling real-world degradations. However, they often incur fidelity-related issues, particularly distorting textual structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based SR framework, namely TADiSR, which integrates text-aware attention and joint segmentation decoders to recover not only natural details but also the structural fidelity of text regions in degraded real-world images. Moreover, we propose a complete pipeline for synthesizing high-quality images with fine-grained full-image text masks, combining realistic foreground text regions with detailed background content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances text legibility in super-resolved images, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics and exhibiting strong generalization to real-world scenarios. Our code is available at here.


ReDit: Reward Dithering for Improved LLMPolicy Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a "perfect" reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often discrete. Our experimental observations suggest that discrete rewards can lead to gradient anomaly, unstable optimization, and slow convergence. To address this issue, we propose ReDit (Reward Dithering), a method that dithers the discrete reward signal by adding simple random noise. With this perturbed reward, exploratory gradients are continuously provided throughout the learning process, enabling smoother gradient updates and accelerating convergence.


Democratic Socialist Leads in D.C. Mayor Race--Furthering Breakout Year For Left

TIME - Tech

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Smooth Quadratic Prediction Markets

Neural Information Processing Systems

When agents trade in a Duality-based Cost Function prediction market, they collectively implement the learning algorithm Follow-The-Regularized-Leader [Abernethy et al., 2013]. We ask whether other learning algorithms could be used to inspire the design of prediction markets. By decomposing and modifying the Duality-based Cost Function Market Maker's (DCFMM) pricing mechanism, we propose a new prediction market, called the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market, the incentivizes agents to collectively implement general steepest gradient descent. Relative to the DCFMM, the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market has a better worst-case monetary loss for AD securities while preserving axiom guarantees such as the existence of instantaneous price, information incorporation, expressiveness, no arbitrage, and a form of incentive compatibility. To motivate the application of the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market, we independently examine agents' trading behavior under two realistic constraints: bounded budgets and buy-only securities. Finally, we provide an introductory analysis of an approach to facilitate adaptive liquidity using the Smooth Quadratic Prediction Market. Our results suggest future designs where the price update rule is separate from the fee structure, yet guarantees are preserved.


Snap unveils 1,995 smart glasses after previous flops

BBC News

Snapchat's parent company has announced it is releasing new smart glasses, a decade after its original pair lost the company tens of millions of dollars . The new augmented reality (AR) glasses, called Specs, will allow users to see digital elements overlaid onto the world. They will cost ยฃ1,995 in the UK and $2,195 in the US when shipping begins this autumn. That makes them cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro mixed-reality headset and its $3,499 starting price, but far more than Meta's smart glasses, which start at $224. Evan Spiegel, co-founder and chief executive of Snap Inc, said the glasses marked the beginning of a new era in computing.


Uncertainty Estimation on Graphs with Structure Informed Stochastic Partial Differential Equations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive results across diverse network modeling tasks, but accurately estimating uncertainty on graphs remains difficult--especially under distributional shifts. Unlike traditional uncertainty estimation, graph-based uncertainty must account for randomness arising from both the graph's structure and its label distribution, which adds complexity. In this paper, making an analogy between the evolution of a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) driven by Mat\'ern Gaussian Process and message passing using GNN layers, we present a principled way to design a novel message passing scheme that incorporates spatial-temporal noises motivated by the Gaussian Process approach to SPDE. Our method simultaneously captures uncertainty across space and time and allows explicit control over the covariance kernel's smoothness, thereby enhancing uncertainty estimates on graphs with both low and high label informativeness. Our extensive experiments on Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection on graph datasets with varying label informativeness demonstrate the soundness and superiority of our model to existing approaches.


REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Earth observation foundation models have shown strong generalization across multiple Earth observation tasks, but their robustness under real-world perturbations remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce REOBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of Earth observation foundation models across six tasks and twelve types of image corruptions, including both appearance-based and geometric perturbations. To ensure realistic and fine-grained evaluation, our benchmark focuses on high-resolution optical remote sensing images, which are widely used in critical applications such as urban planning and disaster response. We conduct a systematic evaluation of a broad range of models trained using masked image modeling, contrastive learning, and vision-language pre-training paradigms. Our results reveal that existing Earth observation foundation models experience significant performance degradation when exposed to input corruptions. The severity of degradation varies across tasks, model architectures, backbone sizes, and types of corruption, with performance drop varying from less than 1% to over 25%. Vision-language models show enhanced robustness, particularly in multimodal tasks. REOBench underscores the vulnerability of current Earth observation foundation models to real-world corruptions and provides actionable insights for developing more robust and reliable models. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/lx709/REOBench.


New research enables a robot to chart a better course

Robohub

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors. But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course. Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania developed a new trajectory-planning system that tackles both challenges at once. Their technique enables a UAV to react to obstacles in milliseconds while staying on a smooth flight path that minimizes travel time. Their system uses a new mathematical formulation that ensures the robot travels safely to its destination along a feasible path, and that is less computationally intensive than other techniques.


Learning Simple Interpolants for Linear Integer Arithmetic

Neural Information Processing Systems

Craig interpolation plays a central role in formal verification tasks such as model checking, invariant generation, and abstraction refinement. In the domain of linear integer arithmetic (LIA), interpolants are crucial for deriving inductive invariants that characterize unreachable or safe program states, enabling scalable and precise reasoning about software and hardware correctness. Despite progress in interpolation algorithms, generating concise and interpretable interpolants remains a key challenge. We propose a lightweight learning-based approach to generating simple interpolants for LIA. Our model learns to lazily sample input problems directly and is complementary to existing logical methods. We show that when Z3 is guided by our learned model, the complexity of the interpolants it produces can be reduced by up to 47.3%. For older solvers, the reduction rate can reach up to 69.1%.