interruption
Windows 11 will now only make you restart once a month for updates
PCWorld reports that Microsoft has changed how Windows 11 handles updates, now bundling drivers and firmware together with monthly security patches. This means users will likely only need to restart their PC once a month during the regular Patch Tuesday cycle, reducing interruptions. The change applies to versions 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1, though critical Microsoft Defender security fixes may still trigger immediate restarts when necessary. Microsoft now bundles updates for drivers, the .NET Framework, and firmware together with the regular security updates that go out on Patch Tuesday every month. This consolidation brings one huge advantage to Windows users: your Windows 11 PC now only needs to be restarted once a month to remain up-to-date and secure.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Took a Call From Donald Trump in the Middle of an All-Hands
The unexpected interruption came hours before the president wrote a congratulatory post on Truth Social about the company's most recent earnings report. US President Donald Trump listens as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the White House during an event on "Investing in America" on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump interrupted Nvidia's all-hands staff meeting on Thursday morning when he called CEO Jensen Huang midway through, three sources who witnessed the interaction tell WIRED. Nvidia's all-hands meetings typically involve Huang presenting or answering questions, on stage, to in-person staff at the company's Santa Clara, California, headquarters, while thousands of remote employees tune in to a virtual livestream. During the meeting on Thursday, Huang received a call on his mobile phone, which he stepped aside to take.
Multimodal "Puppeteer": Exploring Robot Teleoperation Via Virtual Counterpart with LLM-Driven Voice and Gesture Interaction in Augmented Reality
Zhang, Yuchong, Orthmann, Bastian, Ji, Shichen, Welle, Michael, Van Haastregt, Jonne, Kragic, Danica
The integration of robotics and augmented reality (AR) offers promising opportunities to enhance human-robot interaction (HRI) by making teleoperation more transparent, spatially grounded, and intuitive. We present a head-mounted AR "puppeteer" framework in which users control a physical robot via interacting with its virtual counterpart robot using large language model (LLM)-driven voice commands and hand-gesture interaction on the Meta Quest 3. In a within-subject user study with 42 participants performing an AR-based robotic pick-and-place pattern-matching task, we compare two interaction conditions: gesture-only (GO) and combined voice+gesture (VG). Our results show that GO currently provides more reliable and efficient control for this time-critical task, while VG introduces additional flexibility but also latency and recognition issues that can increase workload. We further explore how prior robotics experience shapes participants' perceptions of each modality. Based on these findings, we distill a set of evidence-based design guidelines for AR puppeteer metaphoric robot teleoperation, implicating multimodality as an adaptive strategy that must balance efficiency, robustness, and user expertise rather than assuming that additional modalities are universally beneficial. Our work contributes empirical insights into how multimodal (voice+gesture) interaction influences task efficiency, usability, and user experience in AR-based HRI.
Humanlike Multi-user Agent (HUMA): Designing a Deceptively Human AI Facilitator for Group Chats
Jacniacki, Mateusz, Serrat, Martรญ Carmona
Conversational agents built on large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly prevalent, yet most systems are designed for one-on-one, turn-based exchanges rather than natural, asynchronous group chats. As AI assistants become widespread throughout digital platforms, from virtual assistants to customer service, developing natural and humanlike interaction patterns seems crucial for maintaining user trust and engagement. We present the Humanlike Multi-user Agent (HUMA), an LLM-based facilitator that participates in multi-party conversations using human-like strategies and timing. HUMA extends prior multi-user chatbot work with an event-driven architecture that handles messages, replies, reactions and introduces realistic response-time simulation. HUMA comprises three components--Router, Action Agent, and Reflection--which together adapt LLMs to group conversation dynamics. We evaluate HUMA in a controlled study with 97 participants in four-person role-play chats, comparing AI and human community managers (CMs). Participants classified CMs as human at near-chance rates in both conditions, indicating they could not reliably distinguish HUMA agents from humans. Subjective experience was comparable across conditions: community-manager effectiveness, social presence, and engagement/satisfaction differed only modestly with small effect sizes. Our results suggest that, in natural group chat settings, an AI facilitator can match human quality while remaining difficult to identify as nonhuman.
Dynamic Safe Interruptibility for Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
In reinforcement learning, agents learn by performing actions and observing their outcomes. Sometimes, it is desirable for a human operator to interrupt an agent in order to prevent dangerous situations from happening. Yet, as part of their learning process, agents may link these interruptions, that impact their reward, to specific states and deliberately avoid them. The situation is particularly challenging in a multi-agent context because agents might not only learn from their own past interruptions, but also from those of other agents. Orseau and Armstrong defined safe interruptibility for one learner, but their work does not naturally extend to multi-agent systems. This paper introduces dynamic safe interruptibility, an alternative definition more suited to decentralized learning problems, and studies this notion in two learning frameworks: joint action learners and independent learners. We give realistic sufficient conditions on the learning algorithm to enable dynamic safe interruptibility in the case of joint action learners, yet show that these conditions are not sufficient for independent learners. We show however that if agents can detect interruptions, it is possible to prune the observations to ensure dynamic safe interruptibility even for independent learners.
D-GARA: A Dynamic Benchmarking Framework for GUI Agent Robustness in Real-World Anomalies
Chen, Sen, Zhao, Tong, Bin, Yi, Ma, Fei, Shao, Wenqi, Wang, Zheng
Developing intelligent agents capable of operating a wide range of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) with human-level proficiency is a key milestone on the path toward Artificial General Intelligence. While most existing datasets and benchmarks for training and evaluating GUI agents are static and idealized, failing to reflect the complexity and unpredictability of real-world environments, particularly the presence of anomalies. To bridge this research gap, we propose D-GARA, a dynamic benchmarking framework, to evaluate Android GUI agent robustness in real-world anomalies. D-GARA introduces a diverse set of real-world anomalies that GUI agents commonly face in practice, including interruptions such as permission dialogs, battery warnings, and update prompts. Based on D-GARA framework, we construct and annotate a benchmark featuring commonly used Android applications with embedded anomalies to support broader community research. Comprehensive experiments and results demonstrate substantial performance degradation in state-of-the-art GUI agents when exposed to anomaly-rich environments, highlighting the need for robustness-aware learning. D-GARA is modular and extensible, supporting the seamless integration of new tasks, anomaly types, and interaction scenarios to meet specific evaluation goals.