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OpenAI Brings Its Ass to Court
In, the company sought to show the jury a remarkable trophy as physical proof of Elon Musk's concerning behavior. Wednesday's episode of the trial kicked off on Wednesday with a unique proposition: OpenAI wanted to bring its ass into the courtroom, and lay it bare before the jury. It's a good thing lady justice wears that blindfold. A lawyer for Sam Altman's AI behemoth, Bradley Wilson, approached US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and handed her a small gold statue with a white stone base. It depicted the rear end of a donkey--with two legs, a butt, and a tail--and was inscribed with the message, "Never stop being a jackass for safety."
Two police officers killed in explosion in Moscow
Three people - including two police officers - have been killed in an explosion in Moscow, Russian authorities have said. Two traffic police officers saw a suspicious individual near a police car on the city's Yeletskaya Street, and when they approached the suspect to detain him, an explosive device was detonated, Russia's Investigative Committee has said. The two police officers died from their injuries, along with another individual who was standing nearby. The attack comes two days after a senior Russian general was killed in a car bombing in the capital on Monday. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov died after an explosive device - which had been planted under a car - was detonated.
AdLift: Lifting Adversarial Perturbations to Safeguard 3D Gaussian Splatting Assets Against Instruction-Driven Editing
Hong, Ziming, Huang, Tianyu, Chen, Runnan, Ye, Shanshan, Gong, Mingming, Han, Bo, Liu, Tongliang
Recent studies have extended diffusion-based instruction-driven 2D image editing pipelines to 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), enabling faithful manipulation of 3DGS assets and greatly advancing 3DGS content creation. However, it also exposes these assets to serious risks of unauthorized editing and malicious tampering. Although imperceptible adversarial perturbations against diffusion models have proven effective for protecting 2D images, applying them to 3DGS encounters two major challenges: view-generalizable protection and balancing invisibility with protection capability. In this work, we propose the first editing safeguard for 3DGS, termed AdLift, which prevents instruction-driven editing across arbitrary views and dimensions by lifting strictly bounded 2D adversarial perturbations into 3D Gaussian-represented safeguard. To ensure both adversarial perturbations effectiveness and invisibility, these safeguard Gaussians are progressively optimized across training views using a tailored Lifted PGD, which first conducts gradient truncation during back-propagation from the editing model at the rendered image and applies projected gradients to strictly constrain the image-level perturbation. Then, the resulting perturbation is backpropagated to the safeguard Gaussian parameters via an image-to-Gaussian fitting operation. We alternate between gradient truncation and image-to-Gaussian fitting, yielding consistent adversarial-based protection performance across different viewpoints and generalizes to novel views. Empirically, qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that AdLift effectively protects against state-of-the-art instruction-driven 2D image and 3DGS editing.
Easter Island mystery is SOLVED: Scientists finally pinpoint who built the iconic stone heads 900 years ago
Karoline Leavitt's family member was swarmed by ICE agents while picking up son from school as child's father tell her to'self deport' Deaths from highly infectious virus are growing... as states brace for widespread outbreaks My book on the Kennedys was used as a'mistress manual' by Olivia Nuzzi... then this wannabe Carolyn Bessette had the nerve to hound me with these outrageous texts: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Katy Perry's legal victory as judge orders disabled veteran to pay singer nearly $2m over Montecito mansion Trump reveals next DC renovation project to remove'Biden filth' after White House ballroom Cracker Barrel CEO whines that she got'fired by America' for woke redesign Kroger employee reveals shocking amount laundry products have increased by... 'biggest price jump I've seen in a single week' Hollywood heir, 23, whose mom Anne Heche died in horror car fireball has secret LOVE CHILD with 43-year-old... now she's telling all Missing Melodee Buzzard's mom'left her daughter with strangers she met at the zoo' Rachel Zoe reveals why she dumped husband of 26 years... and if she has started dating again Horrific moment cops found body of Cowboys star Marshawn Kneeland after he shot himself at end of 145 mph chase'This is pretty lurid' Jenny McCarthy, 53, reveals health emergency that involved NINE surgeries, her'teeth falling out' and'growth' on her eyeballs Maryland grandma, 58, dragged across floor after being deported to country she'has never even visited' READ MORE: New'stone head' statue mysteriously appears on Easter Island One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Easter Island may finally be solved - as scientists pinpoint who built the iconic stone heads over 900 years ago. In the past, researchers assumed that the 12 to 80-ton statues would have required the combined efforts of hundreds of labourers to build and move. However, new archaeological evidence shows that the statues, known as moai, were not carved by a single powerful chiefdom. Instead, each moai was carved by a small clan or by an individual family, with as few as four to six people working on a single statue. Using a new 3D model of the island's main moai quarry, which you can explore below, archaeologists identified 30 unique'workshops' where the statues were produced.
"Monuments," Reviewed: The Confederacy Surrenders to a Truer American Past
As the Trump Administration tries to rescue symbols of the Lost Cause, an exhibition in Los Angeles, led by Kara Walker, finds meaning in their desecration. Kara Walker's "Unmanned Drone" (2023) transforms a Stonewall Jackson statue. The first thing you see is a horse's ass, protruding, upside down, from the thorax of a monster. A man's arm descends from the beast's stomach, his gloved hand clutching the blade of a fallen sabre. Every part of the work comes from a statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021.
How Easter Island's famed heads 'walked'
Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. Science Archaeology How Easter Island's famed heads'walked' The mystery of how the roughly 130,000 pound statues traveled from quarry to resting place may be solved. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Rollers, wooden carts, and even alien life are just a few of the theories of how people moved the iconic moai statues of Easter Island (also called Rapa Nui).
The search for Cleopatra's long-lost tomb leads to sunken seaport
Science Archaeology The search for Cleopatra's long-lost tomb leads to sunken seaport A new documentary explores this 2,000-year-old mystery and a connection to the RMS'Titanic.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. She's among the most famous leaders in world history, yet archeologists still don't know the location of Egyptian Queen Cleopatra's tomb. Now, National Geographic Explorer and archaeologist Dr. Kathleen Martรญnez and her team have uncovered a major clue in their 20-year-long hunt: the remains of a port off Egypt's Mediterranean coast. The previously unknown ancient port could have been used to keep the Egyptian queen's remains out of Roman hands.
NovelHopQA: Diagnosing Multi-Hop Reasoning Failures in Long Narrative Contexts
Gupta, Abhay, Lu, Michael, Zhu, Kevin, O'Brien, Sean, Sharma, Vasu
Current large language models (LLMs) struggle to answer questions that span tens of thousands of tokens, especially when multi-hop reasoning is involved. While prior benchmarks explore long-context comprehension or multi-hop reasoning in isolation, none jointly vary context length and reasoning depth in natural narrative settings. We introduce NovelHopQA, the first benchmark to evaluate 1-4 hop QA over 64k-128k-token excerpts from 83 full-length public-domain novels. A keyword-guided pipeline builds hop-separated chains grounded in coherent storylines. We evaluate seven state-of-the-art models and apply oracle-context filtering to ensure all questions are genuinely answerable. Human annotators validate both alignment and hop depth. We additionally present retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) evaluations to test model performance when only selected passages are provided instead of the full context. We noticed consistent accuracy drops with increased hops and context length increase, even for frontier models-revealing that sheer scale does not guarantee robust reasoning. Failure-mode analysis highlights common breakdowns such as missed final-hop integration and long-range drift. NovelHopQA offers a controlled diagnostic setting to test multi-hop reasoning at scale. All code and datasets are available at https://novelhopqa.github.io.
VIST-GPT: Ushering in the Era of Visual Storytelling with LLMs?
Gado, Mohamed, Taliee, Towhid, Memon, Muhammad, Ignatov, Dmitry, Timofte, Radu
Visual storytelling is an interdisciplinary field combining computer vision and natural language processing to generate cohesive narratives from sequences of images. This paper presents a novel approach that leverages recent advancements in multimodal models, specifically adapting transformer-based architectures and large multimodal models, for the visual storytelling task. Leveraging the large-scale Visual Storytelling (VIST) dataset, our VIST-GPT model produces visually grounded, contextually appropriate narratives. W e address the limitations of traditional evaluation metrics, such as BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, and CIDEr, which are not suitable for this task. Instead, we utilize RoViST and GROOVIST, novel reference-free metrics designed to assess visual storytelling, focus - ing on visual grounding, coherence, and non-redundancy. These metrics provide a more nuanced evaluation of narrative quality, aligning closely with human judgment.
Tiny Lidars for Manipulator Self-Awareness: Sensor Characterization and Initial Localization Experiments
Caroleo, Giammarco, Albini, Alessandro, De Martini, Daniele, Barfoot, Timothy D., Maiolino, Perla
For several tasks, ranging from manipulation to inspection, it is beneficial for robots to localize a target object in their surroundings. In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes coarse point clouds obtained from miniaturized VL53L5CX Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors (tiny lidars) to localize a target object in the robot's workspace. We first conduct an experimental campaign to calibrate the dependency of sensor readings on relative range and orientation to targets. We then propose a probabilistic sensor model that is validated in an object pose estimation task using a Particle Filter (PF). The results show that the proposed sensor model improves the performance of the localization of the target object with respect to two baselines: one that assumes measurements are free from uncertainty and one in which the confidence is provided by the sensor datasheet.