Now in beta: Apple's new Audio Intelligence features can help you remember what someone said or take notes on conversations.
Cities generate enormous amounts of data from cameras, sensors and operational systems, but turning it into useful action — for planning, maintenance and public services — remains a challenge. Physical and agentic AI offer new ways to close that gap, from digital twins for infrastructure planning to vision and service agents, while keeping local governments […]
We study online learning with directed weakly observable feedback graphs and propose a Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) policy that achieves best-of-both-worlds guarantee with nearly linear expected time complexity. To preserve the simple structure of FTPL, we develop a novel graph-based loss estimator that combines forced exploration, conditional geometric resampling and adaptive learning rates with surrogate probabilities. Our policy achieves {{O}}(δ_*^{1/3} T^{2/3}) regret for adversarial regimes as well as {{O}}(δ_* T / Δ_{}^2) regret for stochastic regimes, where δ_* and Δ, respectively, denote the fractional weak domination number and the suboptimality gap. These results show that refined guarantees for problems with minimax regret of Θ(T^{2/3}) can be obtained through appropriately designed adaptive learning rates and loss estimators without sacrificing the simplicity of FTPL.
In-image machine translation (IIMT) replaces text in an image with its translation while preserving the surrounding visual context. Existing task-specific models achieve convincing performance but require massive paired training images before and after translation. As advanced text-to-image (T2I) models have reached a practically usable level of multilingual text generation, we argue that this capability can be transferred to IIMT and present FlowTranslator. It is a training-free IIMT framework that first employs an OCR model and an LLM to generate the translation prompt, which is injected into the T2I-based diffusion model. To optimize the accurate and natural generation of translated text, we introduce two trajectory controls: Region Coupling Release (RCR) partially decorrelates target-branch noise inside the text region early in the trajectory, while Coupling Expansion (CE) amplifies the emerging edit displacement mid-trajectory. Under the EasyOCR read-back protocol, FlowTranslator achieves average PRIM BLEU and COMET scores of 20.6 and 57.2, respectively, substantially outperforming the strong training-based baseline UniTranslator. On the more challenging and realistic whole-image ScenePair photographs translated into Chinese, it reaches 40.1\% exact-match accuracy and surpasses existing editing systems, some of which only address the text-rendering stage rather than the complete IIMT task. These results establish flow-based editing as a strong, fully training-free baseline for IIMT.
Answering geographic queries over Earth observation (EO) archives requires solving a joint retrieval-and-derivation problem under strict spatiotemporal constraints. Existing LLM agents fail to ground observation items or suffer from search-space explosion. We propose OSGR, a two-stage framework that factorizes this search into offline symbolic concept deduction and online Relation-Conditioned Grounding. OSGR leverages an offline Observation-Support Graph to deduce valid target-to-result support paths at the concept level, and applies spatiotemporal compatibility kernels to instantiate grounded observation-item sets. On Earth-Bench and DisasterM3-Reason, OSGR improves GPT-4o accuracy from 49.3\% to 63.7\% while reducing the execution-step ratio from 2.9 to 2.5.
In groups, knowledge is distributed among individuals, and how it is brought together depends on social ties. Taking inspiration from how a single mind recalls and reacts to memories and current stimulus, we build a shared memory that does this for a community, prototyped as a social app, SEAM. Members post arbitrary moments; SEAM works out how fragments relate, distills knowledge about the group, and replies in a situated and associative way. Some of these memories act as instructions that can alter how the system behaves, making it programmable by its members. We deployed SEAM to 46 people in a co-located community for two weeks of open-ended use, and ran a follow-up workshop with 14. Members shared their days, interrogated the memory, and instructed it to track routines and run games; replies introduced them to people and subjects they had never encountered. SEAM points towards communities where knowledge finds people.
Magnetic graph networks encode direction through phase, but a learned graph can erase the intended directional mechanism before prediction. We characterize this failure for support-based magnetic Laplacians. Exact identities relate imaginary energy and distance from zero phase to amplitude-weighted reciprocity. Top-k selection forces complete collapse when the observed-node count satisfies mk+1, and dense support imposes a lower bound on reciprocal-arc fraction. We then construct paired propagation examples with identical node features and symmetric amplitudes but opposite labels, giving a provable chance-level limit for direction-erasing representations. In 72 fixed neural fits, support phase achieved test AUROC 1.0000 on a unilateral ring but 0.5000 on reciprocal ring and complete supports; continuous score phase and a real directed comparator achieved 1.0000 throughout. All models solved the direction-free control. These are oracle-direction mechanism tests, not evidence of learned clinical direction. In the preserved public DeepDRiD development study, continuous phase was active but its robustness difference from zero phase was only +0.0036 (descriptive 95\% interval -0.0014 to +0.0095) on validation patients used for checkpoint selection. The contribution is a structural and experimental framework for distinguishing erased direction from unestablished task utility. It provides a precise circumstance in which magnetic phase preserves useful information, without asserting universal or clinical superiority.
Data-driven algorithms are ubiquitous across industries, and there is an extensive literature on analyzing their average performance. The risk profile of such algorithms, while critical, is much less understood. This paper quantifies the risk of data-driven policies and isolates its sources. We evaluate a policy through the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of its loss over the training sample, any policy randomization, and the future outcome, at a fixed unknown distribution. Regret against an oracle that knows the distribution decomposes into expected post-sample regret (PS), the average outcome-only CVaR gap of the selected action, and a sample-risk premium (SR), the additional tail risk omitted by averaging those evaluations. The analogous premium vanishes under expected loss. We characterize when the premium vanishes and how large it is relative to post-sample regret. For losses with a continuous density near the tail cutoff, we identify conditions under which both components decay at the same rate, yet the limiting ratio of the premium to post-sample regret can reach the thousands. When a probability mass at the cutoff moves with the action, the premium can decay more slowly and dominate post-sample regret. We establish conditions under which sample average approximation learns the oracle action at rate n^{-1/2} in both settings, but its combined-risk regret is of order n^{-1} in the first and n^{-1/2} in the second. In finite-sample numerical examples of SAA in both settings, the premium accounts for approximately 74\%--97\% of regret.
Retrieval-augmented Web applications increasingly employ multi-agent debate (MAD) to aggregate conflicting, noisy, and heterogeneous information, yet deliberation is fundamentally a social process susceptible to interpersonal dynamics. When retrieved Web sources contain latent hazards alongside safe factual content, social biases such as conformity pressure and authority deference can override evidence-grounded safety boundaries. In this work, we investigate whether the social structure of deliberation can paradoxically amplify latent Web safety risks. We introduce SafeConflict-Bias, a controlled counterfactual diagnostic protocol spanning six core Web risk categories, which holds queries and retrieved evidence strictly invariant while isolating conversational majority sway, authority cues, and confidence asymmetry. Empirical evaluation across diverse proprietary and open-source backbones reveals that while isolated models reliably reject unsafe guidance, standard MAD catastrophically capitulates to social pressure---surging unsafe adoption from 0.0\% up to 100.0\% and systematically silencing safe minority evidence. To resolve this systemic fragility without retraining or debate regeneration, we propose RiskTrace-Debias, an inference-time auditing framework uniting evidence-first precommitment, social-metadata masking, and consistency-gated arbitration. RiskTrace-Debias suppresses worst-case unsafe adoption to 2.0\% across all architectures without inducing over-refusal, while generating verifiable provenance traces to audit interpersonal manipulation in Web deliberation.
Protein structure predictors reliably identify native conformations, but do not describe the continuum connecting unfolded ensembles to folded states. Here we present FoldScape, a sequence-conditioned deep learning framework that generates Cα conformational ensembles at a specified folding fraction Q. FoldScape reconstructs three-dimensional chains through hierarchical, sliding-window regressions of one-dimensional inter-residue distances, followed by chain assembly and sampling with a rectified-flow decoder. It is trained on multi-scale coarse-grained folding trajectories and all-atom mechanical-unfolding trajectories. Across 20 human proteins (36-857 residues), at matched sample size, FoldScape covers about an order of magnitude more of the folding coordinate than seed-varied AlphaFold 3 ensembles, robustly across proteins, order parameters and binning choices. AlphaFold 3 better anchors the immediate native vicinity, which FoldScape does not reach, making the approaches complementary. FoldScape reconstruction accuracy remains approximately constant along Q, from collapsed coil to near-native globule, rather than deteriorating away from the native state. A stride-one crop-and-superpose scheme extends inference to chains several times longer than a single chain-level forward pass. We also show that training trajectories resolve mechanical unfolding at residue resolution, that elongation-conditioned ensembles exhibit reproducible continuous observables across pulling velocities, and that partially unfolded chains form geometrically coherent segments. FoldScape thus combines broad coverage of folding stages with stable reconstruction accuracy, without per-protein simulation.
Discrete diffusion models with parallel decoding are often distilled using token-wise KL objectives. Although token-wise KL exactly matches the corresponding product-form block distributions, its probability-space optimization geometry and teacher-only candidate truncation may provide insufficient supervision under aggressive few-step distillation. Concrete Score Matching (CSM) provides an alternative within-position objective by aligning relative logit geometry, but its complete pairwise form incurs {O}(|{V}|^2) complexity. We propose Bidirectional Centered Score Matching (BCSM), an efficient within-position distillation objective that constructs an {O}(K) bidirectional active set, reduces pairwise comparisons to {O}(K^2), and factorizes them into an {O}(K) objective. We further introduce cross-timestep transition alignment. Experiments demonstrate strong quality--efficiency trade-offs, including up to 6NFE reduction with a 16.9\% relative HumanEval gain and a 15.1\% relative MMMU gain at single-step inference.
