From Ronaldo’s legendary haircut to Argentina’s improvised 1986 away shirt – the odd stories behind football’s biggest trophy are explored. Plus, a smart series from the makers of Pod Save AmericaThis series from football site Goal dedicates an episode to each one of the last 10 World Cups and pulls…

arXiv:2512.17136v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As the global population ages, many seniors face the problem of loneliness. Companion robots offer a potential solution. However, current companion robots often lack advanced functionality, while task-oriented robots are not designed for social intera…

Scientists have uncovered a missing feedback in Earth’s carbon cycle that could cause global warming to overshoot into an ice age. As the planet warms, nutrient-rich runoff fuels plankton blooms that bury huge amounts of carbon in the ocean. In low-oxygen conditions, this process can spiral out of c…

China levied tariffs on some dairy imports from the European Union — a major exporter — following an anti-subsidy probe, adding to a tit-for-tat trade dispute with the bloc.

arXiv:2512.17284v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We develop an analytical Stackelberg game framework for optimal resource allocation in a sequential attacker--defender setting with a finite set of assets and probabilistic attacks. The defender commits to a mixed protection strategy, after which the …

Tibi Puiu, ZME Science Does regular exercise throughout one's life prolong lifespan? The science is pretty clear, offering a resounding "yes."

arXiv:2512.17484v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Containers conveniently represent a wide class of inductive data types. Their derivatives compute representations of types of one-hole contexts, useful for implementing tree-traversal algorithms. In the category of containers and cartesian morphisms, …

UK company strikes deal as it seeks to expand internationally

Fikayo Tomori says his success at AC Milan shows English players "can go abroad and adapt to a different way of living".

arXiv:2512.17117v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Human-AI interactions are increasingly part of everyday life, yet the interpersonal dynamics that unfold during such exchanges remain underexplored. This study investigates how emotional alignment, semantic exploration, and linguistic innovation emerg…

arXiv:2512.17710v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) provides new opportunities for automated vulnerability identification in software products. While the industry is adopting SBOM-based Vulnerability Scanning (SVS) to identify vulnerabilities, we increasingly observe i…

Your look at what's coming in the week starting Dec. 22.

Japan's space agency said its H3 rocket carrying a navigation satellite failed to put the payload into a planned orbit, a setback for the country's new flagship rocket and its space launch program.

Moscow reported to have forcibly moved dozens of people from border village; Florida peace talks described as ‘productive’. What we know on day 1,398 Continue reading...

arXiv:2512.17001v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper presents a Multi-Robot Multi-Source Term Estimation (MRMSTE) framework that enables teams of mobile robots to collaboratively sample gas concentrations and infer the parameters of an unknown number of airborne releases. The framework is bui…

arXiv:2512.17277v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Pinterest is a leading visual discovery platform where recommender systems (RecSys) are key to delivering relevant, engaging, and fresh content to our users. In this paper, we study the problem of improving RecSys model predictions for cold-start (CS)…

Universidad de Navarra Researchers at the University of Navarra have developed RNACOREX, open-source software capable of identifying Genetics regulatory networks Genetics applications in...

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa will be latest plant to restart 15 years after Fukushima disaster shut down country's nuclear energy.

arXiv:2410.13479v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: This work addresses the problem of computing measures of recognisable sets of infinite trees. An algorithm is provided to compute the probability measure of a tree language recognisable by a weak alternating automaton, or equivalently definable in…

It's always more complicated.

A new report out today from Swiss artificial intelligence-powered managed extended detection and response company Ontinue AG warns of the growing abuse of Nezha, a legitimate open-source server monitoring tool, as a stealthy post-exploration remote access trojan. Nezha, initially developed for the C…

arXiv:2512.17540v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automating code review with Large Language Models (LLMs) shows immense promise, yet practical adoption is hampered by their lack of reliability, context-awareness, and control. To address this, we propose Specification-Grounded Code Review (SGCR), a f…

PDC World Championship history-maker Paul Lim, 71, discusses his longevity in darts as he prepares to face Luke Humphries at Alexandra Palace.

arXiv:2512.17325v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We provide causal mechanistic validation that in-context learning (ICL) decomposes into two separable mechanisms: Task Schema (abstract task type recognition) and Binding (specific input-output associations). Through activation patching experiments ac…

arXiv:2512.17260v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models have recently made significant progress to generate rigorous mathematical proofs. In contrast, utilizing LLMs for theorem proving in formal languages (such as Lean) remains challenging and computationally expensive, particularly …

Quickfire lots fuel a booming business, but critics condemn gambling-style features and popularity with ‘scalpers’Christmas is fast approaching, the shopping days are ebbing away, and in one corner of the internet, the rush to grab highly prized Pokémon trading cards is boiling over into a competiti…

The late-night host's speech will air on U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 on Christmas Day

The much-loved actors (and old friends) reminisce over a cuppa. Plus: a peek behind the scenes at the papal conclave. Here’s what to watch this evening9pm, Sky Arts A wickedly funny and hugely moving hour spent with Judi Dench and her longtime friend Kenneth Branagh. They share a pot of tea in Dench…

"Bloomberg: The Asia Trade" brings you everything you need to know to get ahead as the trading day begins in Asia. Bloomberg TV is live from Australia with Annabelle Droulers and Paul Allen, getting insight and analysis from newsmakers and industry leaders on the biggest stories shaping global marke…

arXiv:2512.17885v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Magnetic fields are critical at many scales to galactic dynamics and structure, including multiphase pressure balance, dust processing, and star formation. Dynamo action determines their dynamical structure and strength. Simulations of combined larg…

Fanil Sarvarov was the head of the armed forces' operational training department, Russia's Investigative Committee said.

Resident doctors in England who went on strike over ongoing pay disputes will return to work on Monday.

Thousands of demonstrators in Serbia gathered in Novi Pazar on Sunday to protest government pressures on universities.

Four residents of Pari, a low-lying Indonesian island, filed the complaint in January 2023.

A 30-year-old man has been given a suspended prison sentence after admitting to operating an illegal waste site on rural land in Northumberland, following a long-running investigation by the Environment Agency. A Northumberland man who dumped waste illegally on his land has been sentenced at court a…

Jin, Bobrowsky, & Cohen, WSJ At a party atop a waterfront hotel, researchers kicked back with cocktails like the Burning TPU, made of honey,...

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The attack appeared to be the latest targeted assassination of senior military officials inside Russia’s borders.

There’s no shortage of stunning scenery and daytime activities in the Lakes. Now, an observatory is offering stellar nocturnal events tooA tawny owl screeches nearby in the dark and her mate replies, hooting eerily from the forest below. A white dome floats in the gloaming above a plain black doorwa…

arXiv:2512.17375v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reward models and LLM-as-a-Judge systems are central to modern post-training pipelines such as RLHF, DPO, and RLAIF, where they provide scalar feedback and binary decisions that guide model selection and RL-based fine-tuning. We show that these judge …

arXiv:2512.17198v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce BumpNet, a sparse neural network framework for PDE numerical solution and operator learning. BumpNet is based on meshless basis function expansion, in a similar fashion to radial-basis function (RBF) networks. Unlike RBF networks, the bas…

Many designers are increasingly warming to the idea of incorporating AI in design, says Cecilia Brenner, the managing director of Design for Good, a global design charity.

Case of man who apparently targeted Christians is latest in series of incidents in Hampshire of animal remains being dumped The people of the New Forest are accustomed to curious goings-on. The woods and heaths of the national park in southern England are the setting for all manner of tales of witch…

arXiv:2512.17414v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) is the core combinatorial problem of Network Slicing, a 5G technology which enables telecommunication operators to propose diverse service-dedicated virtual networks, embedded onto a common substrate network. VNE asks f…

arXiv:2510.20150v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping the recommender system paradigm by enabling users to express preferences and receive recommendations through conversations. Yet, aligning LLMs to the recommendation task remains challenging: pretrained LL…

Where to watch "Elf," "Home Alone," "Love Actually," "The Grinch," and more! Best Christmas movies to rewatch 2025.

Someday, there will be a game-changing drug for Alzheimer’s. It’s worth thinking about that now.

The New York Times' latest game, Pips, brings domino fun to your desktop. How to play Pips as well as hints in case you get stuck.

arXiv:2512.17077v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Models (ARMs), utilizing parallel decoding to overcome sequential bottlenecks. However, existing research focuses primarily on kernel-level optimizations…

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arXiv:2504.03790v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Increasing test-time computation has emerged as a promising direction for improving language model performance, particularly in scenarios where model finetuning is impractical or impossible due to computational constraints or private model weights…

arXiv:2508.13911v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Despite advances in physics-based 3D motion synthesis, current methods face key limitations: reliance on pre-reconstructed 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) built from dense multi-view images with time-consuming per-scene optimization; physics integrat…

arXiv:2502.01890v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: 3D cell segmentation methods are often hindered by \emph{oversegmentation}, where a single cell is incorrectly split into multiple fragments. This degrades the final segmentation quality and is notoriously difficult to resolve, as oversegmentation…

arXiv:2512.14121v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Existing intelligent sports analysis systems mainly focus on "scoring and visualization," often lacking automatic performance diagnosis and interpretable training guidance. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and motion analysis techni…

arXiv:2512.17102v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and multi-turn interactions but struggle to continuously improve and adapt when deployed in new environments. One promising approach is implementing…

arXiv:2405.15325v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Temporally causal representation learning aims to identify the latent causal process from time series observations, but most methods require the assumption that the latent causal processes do not have instantaneous relations. Although some recent …

arXiv:2512.16947v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In 2020, a total of 59,741 websites were blocked by the Indonesian government due to containing negative content, including pornography, with 14,266 websites falling into this category. However, these blocked websites could still be accessed by the pu…

arXiv:2512.17246v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: With the rapid development of distributed renewable energy, multi-microgrids play an increasingly important role in improving the flexibility and reliability of energy supply. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in coordination strategies…

Fighting has resumed hours before the countries' foreign ministers meet in Malaysia to discuss steps to de-escalate.

River Dart, Devon: It probably came here for the shoals of grey mullet, but just for a second, it’s more interested in me and my paddleboardThere’s a lull between the storms, and for the first time in days it’s calm enough to take out my stand-up paddleboard. It’s 7.30am, and on this sheltered tidal…

arXiv:2511.21417v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In pseudo-boolean solving the currently most successful unit propagation strategy is a hybrid mode combining the watched literal scheme with the counting method. This short paper introduces new heuristics for this hybrid decision, which are able t…

Anna Edwards, Guy Johnson and Adam Linton break down today's key themes for analysts and investors on "Bloomberg: The Opening Trade." (Source: Bloomberg)

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial newsThe UK economy has grown more slowly than thought during 2025, as the spectre of recession looms over Britain.The Office for National Statistics has revised down its estimate for growth in the second quarter of 2025, from 0.3% to just 0.2%.“T…

arXiv:2412.20878v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present the first formal correctness proof of Edmonds' blossom shrinking algorithm for maximum cardinality matching in general graphs. We focus on formalising the mathematical structures and properties that allow the algorithm to run in worst-c…

arXiv:2507.18242v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Despite their theoretical appeal, totally corrective boosting methods based on linear programming have received limited empirical attention. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale experimental study of six LP-based boosting formulations, …

arXiv:2506.11023v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Assurance cases (ACs) are a common artifact for building and maintaining confidence in system properties such as safety or robustness. Constructing an AC can be challenging, although existing tools provide support in static, document-centric appli…

arXiv:2406.00780v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Hybrid model predictive control with both continuous and discrete variables is widely applicable to robotic control tasks, especially those involving contacts with the environment. Due to combinatorial complexity, the solving speed of hybrid MPC c…

arXiv:2507.13717v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reconfigurable data center networks (DCNs) enhance traditional architectures with optical circuit switches (OCSs), enabling dynamic reconfiguration of inter-pod links, i.e., the logical topology. Optimizing this topology is crucial for adapting to…

Humane slaughter requirements for farmed fish and end to puppy farming also in new package of animal welfare lawsCaged hens will be a thing of the past in England, the government has announced, as it launches a package of new animal welfare laws.Pig farrowing crates, which campaigners have said are …

arXiv:2512.17178v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has achieved remarkable performance in various multimodal tasks. However, it still struggles with compositional image-text matching, particularly in accurately associating objects with their corresponding …

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Eating full-fat cheese and cream may be associated with a lower risk of dementia, according to a large study that tracked people for more than 25 years. Those who consumed higher amounts of these foods developed dementia less often than those who ate little or none. Interestingly, low-fat dairy prod…

But the explosives did not detonate, according to investigators, who also found a video of the two men training with firearms.

The two suspects behind the deadly Bondi Beach shooting reportedly trained in "tactical" firearms in rural New South Wales before launching their attack, which left 15 dead. As details emerge of the meticulously planned assault, Prime Minister Albanese apologised to Australia's Jewish community for …

arXiv:2512.17109v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Training large neural networks and merging task-specific models both exploit low-rank structure and require parameter importance estimation, yet these challenges have been pursued in isolation. Current workflows compute curvature information during tr…

Markus Strobel also becomes interim chief, replacing Sue Nabi who departs after sharp falls in share price

A Brazilian study has confirmed that Joseph’s Coat, a plant used for generations in folk medicine, can significantly reduce inflammation and arthritis symptoms in lab tests. Researchers observed less swelling, healthier joints, and signs of tissue protection. Just as important, the extract showed a …

Read the December forecast from the FT’s Monetary Policy Radar team

arXiv:2512.17843v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into distinct platforms with unique interface designs and capabilities, existing public datasets treat models as generic text generators, stripping away the interface context that actively shapes user in…

The new bloc's roadmap echoes the Quad plan, but observers say this only splinters civilian forces in Sudan.

arXiv:2512.17262v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Dependable service-oriented computing relies on multiple Quality of Service (QoS) parameters that are essential to assess service optimality. However, real-world QoS data are extremely sparse, noisy, and shaped by hierarchical dependencies arising fro…

arXiv:2512.17462v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Marketing and product personalisation provide a prominent and visible use-case for the application of Information Retrieval methods across several business domains. Recently, agentic approaches to these problems have been gaining traction. This work e…

arXiv:2512.17394v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) -- the ability to attribute beliefs, desires, and emotions to others -- is fundamental for human social intelligence, yet remains a major challenge for artificial agents. Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly app…

arXiv:2512.17452v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-context LLM inference is bottlenecked by the quadratic attention complexity and linear KV cache growth. Prior approaches mitigate this via post-hoc selection or eviction but overlook the root inefficiency: indiscriminate writing to persistent mem…

arXiv:2512.17154v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Movie dubbing seeks to synthesize speech from a given script using a specific voice, while ensuring accurate lip synchronization and emotion-prosody alignment with the character's visual performance. However, existing alignment approaches based on vis…

The year ahead in numbersAs we say goodbye to 2025, let’s delight in its numerical charms one final time. The year was unique this century as being a square number.442 = 1936452 = 2025462 = 2116Five 9sSix 8s.Six 7s.Six 6s.Four 5s.Six 4s.Four 3s.Four 2s.a partridge in a pear tree. (Only joking) Conti…

arXiv:2512.17592v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deep learning has been shown to be very capable at performing many real-world tasks. However, this performance is often dependent on the presence of large and varied datasets. In some settings, like in the medical domain, data is often fragmented acro…

Leaked files show continued activity despite links to terror networks, failed ID checks and other red flags

arXiv:2509.23339v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Blind Face Restoration (BFR) encounters inherent challenges in exploring its large solution space, leading to common artifacts like missing details and identity ambiguity in the restored images. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Likelihood-…

Russia’s investigative committee says it is looking into whether Ukraine’s special services were behind the attackA Russian general was killed in a car bomb attack in Moscow on Monday, Russia’s investigative committee said.Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov, the head of the Russian general staff’s army operation…

Connections: Sports Edition is a New York Times word game about finding common sports threads between words. How to solve the day's puzzle.

One of the biotech industry’s most esteemed venture capitalists anticipates that, after two years of drought, a wave of drug companies are set to go public.

Molly McDonough, Harvard Medicine In every country in the world, demographic data show that women tend to live longer than men. But that pattern may not hold true among U.S. physicians,...

arXiv:2512.17466v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Optimal AP clustering and power allocation are critical in user-centric cell-free massive MIMO systems. Existing deep learning models lack flexibility to handle dynamic network configurations. Furthermore, many approaches overlook pilot contamination …

Clare Lane says she had "no idea" she signed up to a subscription when she bought the items online.

arXiv:2511.09801v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: This work extends the recently introduced Alpha-Procrustes family of Riemannian metrics for symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices by incorporating generalized versions of the Bures-Wasserstein (GBW), Log-Euclidean, and Wasserstein dista…

Former England forward Wayne Rooney hails Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice as a "future captain of England".

arXiv:2512.17146v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Genomic Foundation Models (GFMs), such as Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM), have demonstrated remarkable success in variant effect prediction. However, their security and robustness under adversarial manipulation remain largely unexplored. To address…

A saucer of pomegranate seeds and something sprinkled with petals? No thanks: just give me dinnerIt’s lovely going out for dinner in London. It’s a gastro capital with cuisines from all around the world. One night, Indian, French the next, Peruvian, Ethiopian. You can travel the globe without leavin…