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Paramount Refused to Air an Ad Criticizing Its Merger With Warner Bros.

WIRED

The commercial was submitted by the Freedom of the Press Foundation to run during Donald Trump's UFC event. It criticized the $111 billion merger as a threat to the First Amendment. Viewers who tuned into the Paramount+ livestream of UFC Freedom 250 on Sunday night, held to mark President Trump' s 80th birthday as well as the nation's semiquincentennial, were treated to the surreal spectacle of mixed martial artists beating each other bloody in a massive cage installed on the White House lawn. But there was one bruising blow they missed: an advertisement blasting the $111 billion merger agreement between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery . That's because Paramount refused to air the ad, according to Freedom of the Press Foundation, the nonprofit advocacy group that submitted it to run during the event.


Microsoft knows its new Surface PCs are expensive. That's the point

PCWorld

Microsoft launches Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 8 with Snapdragon X2 processors, starting at $1,499 and $1,599 respectively, marking significant price increases from previous models. PCWorld reports Microsoft's strategy focuses on premium Windows-on-Arm devices rather than competing across all price points like other PC vendors. The new Surface models feature improved graphics performance, enhanced webcams, and long battery life, positioning Microsoft to compete directly with Apple's premium laptops. The Microsoft Surface premium: for years, laptop buyers have criticized Microsoft for charging more and delivering less. Now Microsoft is preparing to ship the Surface Laptop 8 as well as the Surface Pro 12 with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 processors inside.


Elon Musk's unprecendented accumulation of wealth

The Guardian

IPO mints Musk as world's first trillionaire - now SpaceX is public, it will be harder than ever not to have a stake in its future I'm filling in for your usual host Blake Montgomery, who is out this week on vacation. Today, we'll be talking about the historic SpaceX IPO and the US government's surprise order to limit the use of Anthropic's most advanced AI model over cybersecurity concerns. Elon Musk's SpaceX hit the market on Friday in the biggest IPO of all time, raising $85.7bn and easily shattering the previous record of $29.4bn set by the Saudi oil giant Aramco. The rocket, AI and satellite communications company ended the day at $160.95 per share, up from its IPO price of $135 and satisfying any Wall Street skepticism over the unorthodox rollout of the stock. SpaceX's successful market debut turned Musk into the world's first trillionaire, an unprecedented accumulation of wealth that supporters touted as a testament to his financial genius and critics denounced as a symbol of a broken economic system.


Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This stands in contrast to mainstream reasoning models that scale up compute by producing more tokens. Unlike approaches based on chain-of-thought, our approach does not require any specialized training data, can work with small context windows, and can capture types of reasoning that are not easily represented in words. We train a proof-of-concept model from scratch with 3.5 billion parameters and 800 billion tokens. We show that this model can effortlessly use varying levels of compute, significantly improving with additional compute especially on reasoning tasks, such as math and coding. Further, this architecture naturally reduces compute costs via zero-shot per-token adaptive compute, KV-cache sharing and speculative decoding.


GUIDED: Granular Understanding via Identification, Detection, and Discrimination for Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fine-grained open-vocabulary object detection (FG-OVD) aims to detect novel object categories described by attribute-rich texts. While existing open-vocabulary detectors show promise at the base-category level, they underperform in fine-grained settings due to the semantic entanglement of subjects and attributes in pretrained vision-language model (VLM) embeddings - leading to over-representation of attributes, mislocalization, and semantic drift in embedding space. We propose GUIDED, a decomposition framework specifically designed to address the semantic entanglement between subjects and attributes in fine-grained prompts. By separating object localization and fine-grained recognition into distinct pathways, GUIDED aligns each subtask with the module best suited for its respective roles. Specifically, given a fine-grained class name, we first use a language model to extract a coarse-grained subject and its descriptive attributes. Then the detector is guided solely by the subject embedding, ensuring stable localization unaffected by irrelevant or overrepresented attributes. To selectively retain helpful attributes, we introduce an attribute embedding fusion module that incorporates attribute information into detection queries in an attention-based manner.


Trump Says Netanyahu Has to Be 'More Responsible With Respect to Lebanon'

TIME - Tech

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Sequential Monte Carlo for Policy Optimization in Continuous POMDPs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for continuous partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) that explicitly addresses this challenge. Our method casts policy learning as probabilistic inference in a non-Markovian Feynman-Kac model that inherently captures the value of information gathering by anticipating future observations, without requiring suboptimal approximations or handcrafted heuristics. To optimize policies under this model, we develop a nested sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm that efficiently estimates a history-dependent policy gradient under samples from the optimal trajectory distribution induced by the POMDP. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm across standard continuous POMDP benchmarks, where existing methods struggle to act under uncertainty.



Unified Transferability Metrics for Time Series Foundation Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the increasing number of time series pre-trained models, designing transferability evaluation metrics for time series has become an urgent problem to address. While transferability evaluation has been extensively studied in computer vision, we aim to address a critical gap by developing tailored metrics for time series analysis. In this paper, we introduce TEMPLATE, a transferability estimation framework specifically tailored for versatile time series analysis, comprising three complementary metrics: (1) Dependency Learning Score quantifies a model's capacity to capture temporal dependencies.


Bi-Directional Communication-Efficient Stochastic FL via Remote Source Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

The literature largely focuses on lossy compression of model updates in deterministic FL. In contrast, stochastic (Bayesian) FL considers distributions over parameters, enabling uncertainty quantification, better generalization, and, crucially, inherent communication-regularized training through a mirror-descent structure. In this paper, we consider both uplink and downlink communication in stochastic FL, and propose a communication framework based on remote source generation. Employing Minimal Random Coding (MRC) for remote generation, we allow the server and the clients to sample from local and global posteriors (sources), respectively, rather than transmitting locally sampled updates. The framework encompasses communication-regularized local optimization and principled compression of model updates, leveraging gradually updated prior distributions as side information. Through extensive simulations, we show that our method achieves 5 32 reduction in total communication cost while preserving accuracy. We further analyze the communication cost, refining existing MRC bounds and enabling precise quantification of uplink and downlink trade-offs. We also extend our method to conventional FL via stochastic quantization and prove a contraction property for the biased MRC compressor to facilitate convergence analysis.