The maps and images show the extent of destruction and give rescue operations a tool to find any remaining survivors. A satellite image from Vantor shows collapsed apartment buildings and widespread damage caused by the earthquake in the Playa Grande neighborhood of La Guaira. Satellite Technology Is being used to streamline rescue efforts in Venezuela following the two earthquakes that struck on June 24. Space agencies have shared images with emergency authorities and the Venezuelan government that not only reveal the magnitude of the disaster but also allow response teams to identify where to focus their efforts--and the challenges on the ground. Following the twin earthquakes in Venezuela, the Copernicus satellite system activated its emergency mapping mode at the request of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations.

Although numerous Artificial Intelligence Generated Image (AIGI) detectors have been proposed, often reporting high accuracy, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios remains questionable. To bridge this gap, we introduce AIGIBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the robustness and generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art AIGI detectors. AIGIBench simulates real-world challenges through four core tasks: multi-source generalization, robustness to image degradation, sensitivity to data augmentation, and impact of test-time preprocessing. It includes 23 diverse fake image subsets that span both advanced and widely adopted image generation techniques, along with real-world samples collected from social media and AI art platforms. Extensive experiments on 11 advanced detectors demonstrate that, despite their high reported accuracy in controlled settings, these detectors suffer significant performance drops on real-world data, limited benefits from common augmentations, and nuanced effects of preprocessing, highlighting the need for more robust detection strategies. By providing a unified and realistic evaluation framework, AIGIBench offers valuable insights to guide future research toward dependable and generalizable AIGI detection2.

Skill assessment from video entails rating the quality of a person's physical performance and explaining what could be done better. Today's models specialize for an individual sport, and suffer from the high cost and scarcity of expert-level supervision across the long tail of sports. Towards closing that gap, we explore transferable video representations for skill assessment. Our CROSSTRAINER approach discovers skill-attributes--such as balance, control, and hand positioning--whose meaning transcends the boundaries of any given sport, then trains a multimodal language model to generate actionable feedback for a novel video, e.g., "lift hands more to generate more power" as well as its proficiency level, e.g., early expert. We validate the new model on multiple datasets for both cross-sport (transfer) and intra-sport (in-domain) settings, where it achieves gains up to 60% relative to the state of the art. By abstracting out the shared behaviors indicative of human skill, the proposed video representation generalizes substantially better than an array of existing techniques, enriching today's multimodal large language models.

Diverse decoding of large language models is crucial for applications requiring multiple semantically distinct responses, yet existing methods primarily achieve lexical rather than semantic diversity. This limitation significantly constrains Bestof-N strategies, group-based reinforcement learning, and data synthesis. While temperature sampling and diverse beam search modify token distributions or apply n-gram penalties, they fail to ensure meaningful semantic differentiation. We introduce Semantic-guided Diverse Decoding (SemDiD), operating directly in embedding space that balances quality with diversity through three complementary mechanisms: orthogonal directional guidance, dynamic inter-group repulsion, and position-debiased probability assessment.

Objective gait assessment in Parkinson's Disease (PD) is limited by the absence of large, diverse, and clinically annotated motion datasets. We introduce CARE-PD, the largest publicly available archive of 3D mesh gait data for PD, and the first multi-site collection spanning 9 cohorts from 8 clinical centers. All recordings (RGB video or motion capture) are converted into anonymized SMPL meshes via a harmonized preprocessing pipeline. CARE-PD supports two key benchmarks: supervised clinical score prediction (estimating Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, UPDRS, gait scores) and unsupervised motion pretext tasks (2D-to-3D keypoint lifting and full-body 3D reconstruction). Clinical prediction is evaluated under four generalization protocols: within-dataset, cross-dataset, leave-one-dataset-out, and multi-dataset in-domain adaptation. To assess clinical relevance, we compare state-of-the-art motion encoders with a traditional gait-feature baseline, finding that encoders consistently outperform handcrafted features. Pretraining on CARE-PD reduces MPJPE (from 60.8 mm to 7.5 mm) and boosts PD severity macro-F1 by 17 percentage points, underscoring the value of clinically curated, diverse training data. CARE-PD and all benchmark code are released for non-commercial research at https://neurips2025.care-pd.ca.

It also discusses evaluation metrics and the use of explanations to debug models and improve performance.

Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 research tasks sourced from NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML workshops covering diverse ML topics; (2) MLR-Judge, an automated evaluation framework combining LLMbased reviewers with carefully designed review rubrics to assess research quality; and (3) MLR-Agent, a modular agent scaffold capable of completing research tasks through four stages: idea generation, proposal formulation, experimentation, and paper writing. Our framework supports both stepwise assessment across these distinct research stages, and end-to-end evaluation of the final research paper. We then use MLR-Bench to evaluate six frontier LLMs and an advanced coding agent, finding that while LLMs are effective at generating coherent ideas and well-structured papers, current coding agents frequently (e.g., in 80% of the cases) produce fabricated or invalidated experimental results--posing a major barrier to scientific reliability.

With the increasing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for knowledge-intensive tasks, ensuring the adequacy of retrieved documents has become critically important for generation quality. Traditional reranking approaches face three significant challenges: substantial computational overhead that scales with document length, dependency on plain text that limits application in sensitive scenarios, and insufficient assessment of document value beyond simple relevance metrics. We propose EAReranker, an efficient embedding-based adequacy assessment framework that evaluates document utility for RAG systems without requiring access to original text content.

Speech signal analysis poses significant challenges, particularly in tasks such as speech quality evaluation and profiling, where the goal is to predict multiple perceptual and objective metrics. For instance, metrics like PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality), STOI (Short-Time Objective Intelligibility), and MOS (Mean Opinion Score) each capture different aspects of speech quality. However, these metrics often have different scales, assumptions, and dependencies, making joint estimation non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce ARECHO (Autoregressive Evaluation via Chain-based Hypothesis Optimization), a chain-based, versatile evaluation system for speech assessment grounded in autoregressive dependency modeling. ARECHO is distinguished by three key innovations: (1) a comprehensive speech information tokenization pipeline; (2) a dynamic classifier chain that explicitly captures inter-metric dependencies; and (3) a two-step confidence-oriented decoding algorithm that enhances inference reliability. Experiments demonstrate that ARECHO significantly outperforms the baseline framework across diverse evaluation scenarios, including enhanced speech analysis, speech generation evaluation, and, noisy speech evaluation. Furthermore, its dynamic dependency modeling improves interpretability by capturing inter-metric relationships. Across tasks, ARECHO offers reference-free evaluation using its dynamic classifier chain to support subset queries (single or multiple metrics) and reduces error propagation via confidence-oriented decoding.

The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers' Faces for Age Checks--Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed Age verification is consuming the internet . From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove their age to access websites is becoming an everyday requirement . But one of the key technologies underpinning many of these age checks is about to seep into the offline world--with potentially life-changing consequences for people having their age predicted by AI. Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation--where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are --to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom's border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way.