actor
Collective Bargaining in the Information Economy Can Address AI-Driven Power Concentration
This position paper argues that there is an urgent need to restructure markets for the information that goes into AI systems. Specifically, producers of information goods (such as journalists, researchers, and creative professionals) need to be able to collectively bargain with AI product builders in order to receive reasonable terms and a sustainable return on the informational value they contribute. We argue that without increased market coordination or collective bargaining on the side of these primary information producers, AI will exacerbate a large-scale "information market failure" that will lead not only to undesirable concentration of capital, but also to a potential "ecological collapse" in the informational commons. On the other hand, collective bargaining in the information economy can create market frictions and aligned incentives necessary for a pro-social, sustainable AI future. We provide concrete actions to support a coalition-based approach to achieve this goal. For example, researchers and developers can establish technical mechanisms such as federated data management tools and explainable data value estimation techniques to inform and facilitate collective bargaining in the information economy. Additionally, regulatory and policy interventions may be introduced to support trusted data intermediary organizations representing guilds or syndicates of information producers.
RADAR: Benchmarking Language Models on Imperfect Tabular Data
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being deployed to perform autonomous data analyses. However, their data awareness--the ability to recognize, reason over, and appropriately handle data artifacts such as missing values, outliers, and logical inconsistencies--remains underexplored. These artifacts are especially common in real-world tabular data and, if mishandled, can significantly compromise the validity of analytical conclusions. To address this gap, we present RADAR, a benchmark for systematically evaluating data-aware reasoning on tabular data. We develop a framework to simulate data artifacts via programmatic perturbations to enable targeted evaluation of model behavior. RADAR comprises 2980 table query pairs, grounded in real-world data spanning 9 domains and 5 data artifact types. In addition to evaluating artifact handling, RADAR systematically varies table size to study how reasoning performance holds when increasing table size. Our evaluation reveals that, despite decent performance on tables without data artifacts, frontier models degrade significantly when data artifacts are introduced, exposing critical gaps in their capacity for robust, data-aware analysis. Designed to be flexible and extensible, RADAR supports diverse perturbation types and controllable table sizes, offering a valuable resource for advancing tabular reasoning.1
Michael Fassbender says it is becoming harder to know what to trust online
What happens if pretending to be someone else becomes your entire life? It is a question at the heart of many of the biggest spy dramas, from Slow Horses to Black Doves - and it is one that TV thriller series The Agency explores more deeply than most. Returning for a second season, the Paramount+ thriller follows CIA operatives living under deep-cover identities. It examines not just the dangers of espionage, but the psychological cost of maintaining a lie for years. Starring Michael Fassbender, Richard Gere and Katherine Waterston, the series is based on acclaimed French drama The Bureau.
Millions in path of 'extreme' life-threatening floods as Arthur slams EIGHT states after making landfall
'Ringleader' of alleged UFC drone attack to kill Trump is unmasked as illegal migrant who was granted DACA stay under Obama Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Horrific new videos blow Texas woman's mystery death wide open: Her agonizing'final gasp'... unthinkably vile corpse claims... and sick past of man who saw her last 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 Spy world panic as Tulsi Gabbard prepares to unleash bombshell file dumps on secret CIA'mind control' project and Dr. Fauci Olivia Wilde, 42, complains about being on Maxim's Hot 100 List calling it the'most f***** up thing in the world' Has Taylor Swift already revealed her wedding dress designer? 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 Kanye West's wife Bianca Censori raises eyebrows in plunging white lace lingerie as she photographs a nude model at Art Basel in Switzerland Knicks set to come face to face with Trump after president was'thunderously booed' at NBA Finals game 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 Teen tourist thrown to death by Central Park horse was trying to save mom who flew out of carriage during family's first visit to Big Apple Father keeps his cool as shouting man calls cops on him for taking his two young daughters into women's restroom Trump privately frets Bibi Netanyahu's zeal to'bomb everyone' could turn him into another disgraced president'Moscow will burn', Zelensky vows as Russia's capital is blanketed in toxic smoke following huge Ukraine drone attack He drove a Rolls-Royce and lived the American dream. But behind the Gucci was the ATF's most unlikely secret weapon. MORE: Meteorologist reveals America's most dangerous cities in super El Niรฑo's'corridor of chaos'... and warns this is only the beginning As many as 40 million people across eight states are in the deadly path of Tropical Storm Arthur after the first named storm of hurricane season made landfall Wednesday night.
528d56195a2c77c808494c86fa7c77ad-Supplemental-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
A.1 Dataset Examples450 In this section of the appendix, we present a detailed overview of several representative tasks from451 each category included in REASONINGGYM. For each task, we describe its structure, complexity452 parameters, and provide examples.453 A.1.1 complex_arithmetic(Algebra)454 Find the solution of an arithmetic operation involving complex numbers.455 The spiral order is clockwise, starting from the top-left corner. Predict the corresponding output grid by applying the rule you found.
Actor-Free Continuous Control via Structurally Maximizable Q-Functions
Value-based algorithms are a cornerstone of off-policy reinforcement learning due to their simplicity and training stability. However, their use has traditionally been restricted to discrete action spaces, as they rely on estimating Q-values for individual state-action pairs. In continuous action spaces, evaluating the Q-value over the entire action space becomes computationally infeasible. To address this, actor-critic methods are typically employed, where a critic is trained on off-policy data to estimate Q-values, and an actor is trained to maximize the critic's output. Despite their popularity, these methods often suffer from instability during training. In this work, we propose a purely value-based framework for continuous control that revisits structural maximization of Q-functions, introducing a set of key architectural and algorithmic choices to enable efficient and stable learning. We evaluate the proposed actor-free Q-learning approach on a range of standard simulation tasks, demonstrating performance and sample-efficiency on par with state-of-the-art baselines, without the cost of learning a separate actor. Particularly, in environments with constrained action spaces, where the value functions are typically non-smooth, our method with structural maximization outperforms traditional actor-critic methods with gradient-based maximization. We have released our code at https://github.com/USC-Lira/Q3C.
27aa3aeff0f8460a7b43d30fa6c5c032-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming search engines into Conversational Search Engines (CSE). Consequently, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is being shifted into Conversational Search Engine Optimization (C-SEO). We are beginning to see dedicated C-SEO methods for modifying web documents to increase their visibility in CSE responses. However, they are often tested only for a limited breadth of application domains; we do not know whether certain C-SEO methods would be effective for a broad range of domains. Moreover, existing evaluations consider only a single-actor scenario where only one web document adopts a C-SEO method; in reality, multiple players are likely to competitively adopt the cutting-edge C-SEO techniques, drawing an analogy from the dynamics we have seen in SEO.
'Positive' or 'unnecessary'? - UK teens on social media ban
School children in Preston and Manchester had mixed feelings about a proposed social media ban for under-16s following an announcement from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. On Monday, Starmer said under-16s will be banned from social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X by spring 2027. Speaking to the BBC, some pupils described the ban as unnecessary as they asked for more responsibility for parents. One student said she hoped the ban will have a positive impact on young people's lives and their mental health. How much screen time is too much for under fives?
China Didn't Make People Hate Data Centers
GOP lawmakers, tech investors, and even OpenAI have tied the anti-data-center movement in the US to Chinese interference. Experts say it's much more complicated than that. Right-wing officials and data center investors are increasingly claiming that data center protests are being funded and influenced by the Chinese government. OpenAI added to the discourse on Wednesday when it released a report describing a cluster of accounts originating in China that, the company said, had been spreading anti-data-center messages on social media. Experts who spoke to WIRED, however, are skeptical of the funding claims.
C-SEO Bench: Does Conversational SEO Work?
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming search engines into Conversational Search Engines (CSE). Consequently, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is being shifted into Conversational Search Engine Optimization (C-SEO). We are beginning to see dedicated C-SEO methods for modifying web documents to increase their visibility in CSE responses. However, they are often tested only for a limited breadth of application domains; we do not know whether certain C-SEO methods would be effective for a broad range of domains. Moreover, existing evaluations consider only a single-actor scenario where only one web document adopts a C-SEO method; in reality, multiple players are likely to competitively adopt the cutting-edge C-SEO techniques, drawing an analogy from the dynamics we have seen in SEO.