We present a systematic evaluation of representation learning objectives for particle physics within a unified framework. Our study employs a shared transformer-based particle-cloud encoder with standardized preprocessing, matched sampling, and a consistent evaluation protocol on a jet classification dataset. We compare contrastive (supervised and self-supervised), masked particle modeling, and generative reconstruction objectives under a common training regimen. In addition, we introduce targeted supervised architectural modifications that achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark evaluations. This controlled comparison isolates the contributions of the learning objective, highlights their respective strengths and limitations, and provides reproducible baselines. We position this work as a reference point for the future development of foundation models in particle physics, enabling more transparent and robust progress across the community.

Tesla Is Urging Drowsy Drivers to Use'Full Self-Driving'. Experts say that advising customers to switch in on when they're drifting between lanes is exactly the wrong move. Since Tesla launched its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature in beta in 2020, the company's owner's manual has been clear: Contrary to the name, cars using the feature can't drive themselves. Tesla's driver assistance system is built to handle plenty of road situations--stopping at stop lights, changing lanes, steering, braking, turning. Still, "Full Self-Driving (Supervised) requires you to pay attention to the road and be ready to take over at all times," the manual states.

The reliability of secure graphic verification, a key anti-counterfeiting tool, is undermined by poor image acquisition on smartphones. Uncontrolled user captures of these high-entropy patterns cause high false rejection rates, creating a significant'reliability gap'. T o bridge this gap, we depart from traditional perceptual IQA and introduce a framework that predictively estimates a frame's utility for the downstream verification task. W e propose a lightweight model to predict a quality score for a video frame, determining its suitability for a resource-intensive oracle model. Our framework is validated using re-contextualized FNMR and ISRR metrics on a large-scale dataset of 32,000+ images from 105 smartphones. Furthermore, a novel cross-domain analysis on graphics from different industrial printing presses reveals a key finding: a lightweight probe on a frozen, ImageNet-pretrained network generalizes better to an unseen printing technology than a fully fine-tuned model. This provides a key insight for real-world generalization: for domain shifts from physical manufacturing, a frozen general-purpose backbone can be more robust than full fine-tuning, which can overfit to source-domain artifacts.

COCO is available for non-commercial use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license.

It has been dubbed'Britain's most confusing junction', thanks to its complex system of mini–roundabouts. But while many drivers struggle to navigate their way around Swindon's Magic Roundabout, the junction proved to be light work for a self–driving car. To put its Full Self Driving (FSD) mode to the test, Tesla sent a Model 3 through the complex intersection. Footage shows the car expertly navigating the roundabout – not just once, but three times – as cars continuously join from seemingly every direction. Fans have flocked to X to discuss the feat, with one calling it'superb'.

Phenotyping is the process of distinguishing groups of patients to identify different types of disease progression. A recent trend employs low-rank matrix and tensor factorization methods for their capability of dealing with multi-modal, heterogeneous, and missing data. Symptom quantification is crucial for understanding patient experiences in inflammatory bowel disease, especially in conditions such as ulcerative colitis (UC). However, patient-reported symptoms are typically noisy, subjective, and significantly more sparse than other data types. For this reason, they are usually not included in phenotyping and other machine learning methods. This paper explores the application of computational phenotyping to leverage Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) using a novel supervised coupled matrix-tensor factorization (SCMTF) method, which integrates temporal PROs and temporal labs with static features to predict medication persistence in ulcerative colitis. This is the first tensor-based method that is both supervised and coupled, it is the first application to the UC domain, and the first application to PROs. We use a deep learning framework that makes the model flexible and easy to train. The proposed method allows us to handle the large amount of missing data in the PROs. The best model predicts changes in medication 8 and 20 months in the future with AUCs of 0.853 and 0.803 on the test set respectively. We derive interpretable phenotypes consisting of static features and temporal features (including their temporal patterns). We show that low-rank matrix and tensor based phenotyping can be successfully applied to the UC domain and to highly missing PRO data. We identify phenotypes useful to predict medication persistence - these phenotypes include several symptom variables, showing that PROs contain relevant infromation that is usually discarded.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assisting users in the real world, yet their reliability remains a concern. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) has been heralded as a tool to enhance human-LLM collaboration by enabling users to know when to trust LLM predictions. We argue that current practices for uncertainty quantification in LLMs are not optimal for developing useful UQ for human users making decisions in real-world tasks. Through an analysis of 40 LLM UQ methods, we identify three prevalent practices hindering the community's progress toward its goal of benefiting downstream users: 1) evaluating on benchmarks with low ecological validity; 2) considering only epistemic uncertainty; and 3) optimizing metrics that are not necessarily indicative of downstream utility. For each issue, we propose concrete user-centric practices and research directions that LLM UQ researchers should consider. Instead of hill-climbing on unrepresentative tasks using imperfect metrics, we argue that the community should adopt a more human-centered approach to LLM uncertainty quantification.