Aston Villa boss Unai Emery had an unhappy 18-month spell in charge of Arsenal that ended in 2019, but can he get the better of his old club on Tuesday? After the abuse he took from Arsenal fans, I'd love nothing more than Emery to go back to the Emirates and win, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. He absolutely didn't deserve that. Some of those fans should take a long, hard look at themselves for the way they mocked him. I hope Villa go there and spank them, just because of that. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For week 19 - which includes the final games of 2025 on Tuesday, 30 December and the first matches of 2026 on New Year's Day - he takes on singer-songwriter Tom A Smith, who is a Sunderland fan.

Arsenal are sitting top of the Premier League at Christmas, but it is BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton who leads the way when it comes to predictions. I'm number one at Christmas - again, said Sutton, who as a player led the Premier League table at this point with Norwich in 1992 and Blackburn in 1994, and went on to win the title with Rovers. It's a big deal for me to be top, as well as for Arsenal . AI is the go-to for virtually everyone in the world whenever they have to ask anything, so the fact that I am beating it - and let's face it, I have stuffed it for half a season now - is pretty incredible. It says a lot about me, and I'm delighted. Rather than asking AI about everything, maybe people should come to me to tap into my intelligence instead?

Aston Villa are going for a fourth successive Premier League victory when they travel to Brighton on Wednesday, but should Unai Emery's side change the way they have been scoring goals on their winning run? There is apparently some debate about whether Villa's xG (expected goals) is unsustainable because they are scoring from long range, but that's nonsense, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Villa have good players who can shoot from the edge of the box, so are you seriously going to tell them not to shoot now, because of xG? Give me a break. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For the midweek fixtures in week 14, he takes on musician, author and Fulham fan Felix White. White is the guitarist with The Maccabees and 86TVs. His new book'Whatever will be, will be: A Matter of Life and Football' is out now.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Tucked along the picturesque Zeravshan River in the rocky mountains of northwestern Tajikistan lies the ruins of a forgotten, ancient palace. The monumental royal complex once presided over a bustling city along the Silk Road, not far from modern Tajikistan's border with Uzbekistan. In its heyday, the palace's walls were covered with colorful murals and intricate wooden carvings, most of which have been lost to time--until now. A study recently published in the academic journal recreates and analyzes one of palace's most surprising murals .

Commercial LLM services often conceal internal reasoning traces while still charging users for every generated token, including those from hidden intermediate steps, raising concerns of token inflation and potential overbilling. This gap underscores the urgent need for reliable token auditing, yet achieving it is far from straightforward: cryptographic verification (e.g., hash-based signature) offers little assurance when providers control the entire execution pipeline, while user-side prediction struggles with the inherent variance of reasoning LLMs, where token usage fluctuates across domains and prompt styles. To bridge this gap, we present PALACE (Predictive Auditing of LLM APIs via Reasoning Token Count Estimation), a user-side framework that estimates hidden reasoning token counts from prompt-answer pairs without access to internal traces. PALACE introduces a GRPO-augmented adaptation module with a lightweight domain router, enabling dynamic calibration across diverse reasoning tasks and mitigating variance in token usage patterns. Experiments on math, coding, medical, and general reasoning benchmarks show that PALACE achieves low relative error and strong prediction accuracy, supporting both fine-grained cost auditing and inflation detection. Taken together, PALACE represents an important first step toward standardized predictive auditing, offering a practical path to greater transparency, accountability, and user trust.

His hands-off approach to the production of his famous balloon dogs and stainless steel rabbits has been criticised in the past but Jeff Koons, the world's most expensive artist, has drawn a red-line: "I wouldn't – for my own base work – be looking at AI to be developing my work." The potential and the risks of artificial intelligence is perhaps the hottest topic in the artistic world, with deep-learning models now able to replicate styles and produce unique compositions on request. It would appear to be a heaven-sent development for Koons, who was speaking to the Guardian at the launch of Reflections, a joint exhibition of his works alongside those of Pablo Picasso at the Alhambra in Granada. Koons's reliance on teams of craftspeople and cutting-edge technology in the making of his pieces prompted the Collector magazine last year to ask: "Is Jeff Koons an actual artist?" Exploiting technological advances is what he does.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing and generating content across multiple data modalities, including text, images, audio, and video. However, a significant drawback of MLLMs is their reliance on static training data, leading to outdated information and limited contextual awareness. This static nature hampers their ability to provide accurate, up-to-date responses, particularly in dynamic or rapidly evolving contexts. Integrating Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation (Multimodal RAG) offers a promising solution, but the system would inevitably encounter the multi-granularity noisy correspondence (MNC) problem, which involves two types of noise: coarse-grained (query-caption) and fine-grained (query-image). This noise hinders accurate retrieval and generation. In this work, we propose \textbf{RagLLaVA}, a novel framework with knowledge-enhanced reranking and noise-injected training, to address these limitations. We instruction-tune the MLLM with a simple yet effective instruction template to induce its ranking ability and serve it as a reranker to precisely filter the top-k retrieved images. For generation, we inject visual noise during training at the data and token levels to enhance the generator's robustness. Extensive experiments are conducted on the subsets of two datasets that require retrieving and reasoning over images to answer a given query. Our results demonstrate the superiority of RagLLaVA in retrieving accurately and generating robustly. Code and models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/RagLLaVA.

It's been just over a week since Kate Middleton, the internet's favorite "missing person," claimed that a photoshopped image of her with her children on U.K. Mother's Day was edited by her, for unspecified reasons. Then, on Monday, we had our first recorded sighting of the princess, out shopping with Prince William at the Royal Farms Windsor Farm Shop, near Windsor Castle. The video was released by TMZ and the Sun, and stills from it were plastered on the front pages of all the British tabloids Tuesday. Supposedly, it was taken by a 40-year-man, Nelson Silva, who lives nearby and was quoted in TMZ as saying: "Kate looked happy and relaxed. They look happy just to be able to go to a shop and mingle.

For centuries, Baghdad seemed to stand at the centre of the world. Chosen as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate around the year 762, the city rose from the banks of the Tigris River with circular city walls enfolding lush palaces, becoming a beacon for the world's great creative, cultural and scientific minds. One of the first astronomical observatories in the Islamic world was built in the city. Its library -- the House of Wisdom -- amassed vast collections of texts, enough to rival the Great Library of Alexandria. And its population swelled to over a million, as merchants and pioneers in mathematics, physics and machinery gathered within its gates.

Artificial intelligence has claimed its first scalp, according to the Financial Times. It says shares in the education sector fell sharply on Tuesday after US company Chegg, which provides online study guides, said that a "significant spike in student interest" in AI tool ChatGPT was harming its customer growth. The paper says it marks "one of the first instances of a company acknowledging a hit to its finances as a direct result of advances" in the technology.