Shopify is expanding WebMCP support to checkout, allowing browser-based AI agents to update order details and complete purchases with a buyer’s authorization.
Just like the rest of the U.S., data centers and AI are dividing climate tech founders and investors.
Our early guidelines for safety cases in frontier AI training cover technical safeguards, operational practices, and investigating misalignment incidents
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is now available on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. It's a smarter, more efficient Sonnet model for focused coding and knowledge work, with a lower cost per task at faster speed. This post covers what's new, when to choose Sonnet, and how to get started.
OpenAI popularized the modern generative AI chatbot, but as its 2026 DevDay event approaches, it's fallen behind in one of the industry's hottest categories: continuously…
As the debate rages over whether the recent spate of rogue AI agents is a step toward AGI or a more conventional engineering problem, Nvidia…
In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian's Door. Vivian's Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources…
Anthropic has released the newest version of its mid-range model, boasting faster response times and less token burn.
Realistic and editable animal fur reconstruction from multi-view images is challenging due to fine-scale detail, self-occlusion and obfuscation, and, unlike human hair, the lack of animal-fur datasets. Fur usually covers most of an animal's body, with large inter-species and intra-species variability. We present FurE, an efficient strand-based animal fur reconstruction method that recovers a per-strand, editable groom by optimizing a root-conditioned latent field, decoded into strand geometry via a PCA-based decoder. We reconstruct a defurred animal body using local fur-thickness cues from a surface-constrained Gaussian Frosting representation together with part-based priors. We further show that a PCA-based decoder learned from human-hair strand data can alleviate animal-data scarcity while enabling substantially faster optimization. FurE achieves a 10x speedup in strand training over current SOTA dense per-strand optimization while retaining strand fidelity and generalizing across synthetic and real-world sequences, with quantitative and qualitative validation despite the reduction in training time.
One deployed language model must often serve many compute budgets, yet serving each budget still means a separate training or compression run per point. We train a Telescopic Language Model (TLM) to be that continuum: a nested-capacity Transformer supervised by stochastic prefix supervision with a full anchor. At every step, one randomly truncated prefix of the capacity axis is trained against the full next-token target, alongside one full-capacity pass, so the trained artifact is a valid language model at every depth. Two forward-backward passes per step, no architectural change, nothing extra at inference. Fixed-exit suites such as Matryoshka Language Model Suites (MLMS) occupy one point in this design space, and the point has a cost: supervising only a few fixed exits leaves the nested model at chance level everywhere else (perplexity 10^2-10^5 in our baselines). On a 200M proxy suite (20B FineWeb-Edu tokens, identical data stream for all methods), a single TLM run is a valid language model at every one of its twenty layer prefixes, in perplexity and on perplexity-sensitive downstream tasks, reducing the area under the quality-budget curve by 43-44% relative to the fixed-exit suites while matching them at full capacity, at ~12% lower GPU cost per run. The prefix sampling density is a dial: concentrating it on a few depths recovers fixed-exit quality there at the price of the continuum, so the operating points become a training-time choice rather than an architectural one. These results indicate that the training objective, not the nesting itself, is what makes a model elastic.
Modern video diffusion models require tens of denoising evaluations over long spatiotemporal token sequences. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) reduces the number of function evaluations (NFE) to just a few. However, DMD samples can degrade during training, exhibiting progressive oversaturation and artifacts. We trace this instability to critic errors, which enter successive student updates and accumulate over time. We introduce Projected Distribution Matching Distillation (PDMD) to filter critic errors. PDMD projects out the component of the DMD update parallel to the student-critic endpoint residual. At a fixed noisy query, we prove that this residual is an unbiased estimate of the critic's endpoint error. Under high-dimensional assumptions, this projection removes a constant fraction of critic error while discarding only a vanishing fraction of ideal DMD signal. Empirically, the projection stabilizes training and improves sample quality where DMD degrades and develops unnatural textures. PDMD requires only a one-line code change to DMD, with no extra loss, network, data, model pass, or multi-stage training. With Wan2.1, PDMD achieves a VBench total score of 83.73 at 4 NFE, surpassing matched DMD by 1.03 points. On MiniMax-H3 joint video-audio generation, PDMD achieves a VideoGen-Eval visual total score of 83.17, 0.41 points above the strongest distilled baseline. PDMD also achieves the best performance on all six audio metrics among the compared 4-NFE models. Qualitative comparisons and user studies favor PDMD over the distilled baselines in visual quality, motion, and audio quality. Code and models are available at https://pdmd2026.github.io/.
Unified multimodal models can both look at and render images, so in principle they can repair their own generations: diagnose what an image gets wrong, revise it, observe the result, and diagnose again. Whether a revision helps is known only after it is rendered, so the reflection text and the image generation must be learned jointly, over the whole loop. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on reflection trajectories gives a cold start but does not find the high-success repair paths, and naive RL that optimizes only the renderer or only one head leaves most of the gain untapped. We introduce UMM-Reflection, which applies reinforcement learning (RL) to complete reflection trajectories inside one unified model: sibling trajectories share one initial image, so the group-relative advantage compares reflection strategies, and one trajectory-level advantage updates both the reflection tokens and the flow-based revisions, avoiding the combinatorial blow-up of per-round credit assignment. Unlike single-round editing or pipelines with an external critic, credit flows across rounds and to both roles of the same model, and no verifier is needed at inference. On BAGEL, UMM-Reflection improves GenEval by 12.05 points over SFT, and the gains transfer to WISE (+10.97), OneIG-Bench (+3.48), and T2I-CompBench++ (+4.63), none of which is used in training.
Identifying intertextual references is central to literary scholarship, but computationally difficult when source material is transformed through paraphrase, allusion, historical language, and translation. We investigate this problem through biblical intertextuality in Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Tales. Drawing on the commentary to a critical edition, we construct a benchmark of 189 annotated references and evaluate retrieval against all 31,170 verses of historically plausible Danish Old and New Testament translations. We compare TF-IDF and BM25 with multilingual and Danish sentence encoders, examine the effect of linguistic normalization, and fine-tune a Danish encoder using hard negatives and five-fold cross-validation. We analyze performance across automatically derived lexical-overlap strata representing quotations, paraphrases, and allusions. Linguistically normalized BM25 provides a strong zero-shot baseline, attaining an overall R@10 of 0.365 and retrieving every quotation within its ten highest-ranked verses. The best zero-shot dense model achieves a comparable overall score of 0.360 while performing better on allusions. Fine-tuning DFM-large raises its overall R@10 from 0.265 to 0.508 and more than doubles its performance on allusions, from 0.138 to 0.339. However, evaluation against editorial annotations alone understates the model's scholarly usefulness: a literary scholar judged seven of 30 selected rank-one predictions counted as false positives to be meaningful additional references. These findings show both the potential and the epistemic limits of computational intertextual retrieval. Rather than treating scholarly annotations as exhaustive or model outputs as discoveries, we propose retrieval models as heuristic co-readers that recover documented references and generate candidates for expert-led close reading.
