Chinese AI • Open Source • Security • Incidents. Signal, not noise.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How a new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium A new method for extracting lithium could cut costs and emissions from one of the...
The alert was raised on May 5. Four health-care workers in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had died from an unknown illness within four days. Rapid response teams were sent to investigate, and tests at a research center in Kinshasa revealed the culprit: the Bundibugyo...
Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence includes a statement that warrants serious attention from technologists and policymakers: “Technology is never neutral.” Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is a clarion call to all people to act with courage and solidarity as we...
arXiv:2605.28849v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient temporal-difference methods provide stable off-policy prediction with linear function approximation, but their practical performance is strongly affected by the geometry induced by the auxiliary-variable metric. Existing Mirror-Prox TD...
arXiv:2605.28855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Temporal-difference learning with function approximation can be unstable under off-policy sampling. TDC stabilizes off-policy TD through an auxiliary covariance correction, and TDRC further regularizes this correction in a single-timescale recursion....
arXiv:2605.28864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Cognitive Categorical Transformer (CCT) is a 306M-parameter architecture that augments a pretrained GPT-2 Small backbone with cognitively grounded components derived from category theory and several inspirations from cognitive science. Under a...
arXiv:2605.28883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tropical forests worldwide are under intense deforestation pressure driven by economic and political interests, and scientific evidence suggests this deforestation contributes to climate change. This paper proposes a novel logging method for tropical...
arXiv:2605.28897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-generated reviews for scientific papers are gaining considerable traction and are even being officially piloted by major conferences. We have to assume that not only reviewers are using LLM-assistance, but also that authors use LLMs to revise...
arXiv:2605.28839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge editing methods such as ROME and MEMIT update factual associations in transformer models by modifying MLP weights. While evaluated mainly by output behavior, their internal mechanism remains underexplored. We investigate whether edits rely...
arXiv:2605.28850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study behavioral alignment and representation dynamics of large language model (LLM) agents in financial decision environments. Using TradeArena, an auditable trading-agent testbed with risk reports, execution simulation, memory, and replayable...
arXiv:2605.28860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities. Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) retains prior capabilities more effectively than supervised fine-tuning (SFT),...
arXiv:2605.28862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug discovery is a lengthy and resource-intensive process composed of multiple stages. Among these stages, lead optimization plays a critical role in transforming early hit compounds into viable drug candidates. This stage requires improving...
arXiv:2605.28863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imperfect-information multiplayer games test whether agents can act under hidden information, sparse rewards, and non-stationary opponents. We study these challenges in Big 2, a four-player imperfect-information card game. We develop a self-play RL...
arXiv:2605.27393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent dialogue, but prior works lack situational grounding, dynamic strategy control, and evaluation aligned with clinical standards in motivational interviewing (MI). We introduce StoryMI, a multi-LLM agent...
arXiv:2605.27483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite theoretical promise, debate as a scalable oversight protocol has produced mixed empirical results: gains in some settings, and null effects in others, especially when the judge does not have information hidden from it. We study proposer-critic...
arXiv:2605.27545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Jailbreak attacks on multimodal AI systems remain underexplored, even though unsafe image generation can have more severe consequences than unsafe text and current defenses are relatively immature. We introduce PAST2HARM, a simple yet effective...
arXiv:2605.27546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Crisis Responders (CRs) rapidly assess thousands of youth SMS conversations each year to identify mental health concerns and guide support. Yet youth distress is increasingly expressed through evolving and context-specific language that often does not...
arXiv:2605.27564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are becoming the default interface to factual knowledge, yet they often verify outputs more reliably than they generate them. This generation-verification gap (GV-gap) underlies many recent advances in self-improvement and reasoning,...
Researchers say they’ve found a new way to extract lithium, a crucial metal used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and energy storage arrays. This new technique could be more environmentally friendly and cheaper than existing ones.  The research was published today in...
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Climate tech companies are going public. What’s next? Solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, hitting a $6 billion valuation....
Biologists use Co-Scientist to find novel factors that successfully rejuvenate human cells.