25 Aug 2026 · Essay Should we let AI govern us? What if AI were in charge of public policy and politics? Perhaps it would shift food subsidies, electrify transport, build cheap power, sign the plastics treaty, restore t…

Shift comes after Chris Bowen said Labor would use constitutional powers to override states resisting renewable rules Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Anthony Albanese has backed down on demands that states must power new AI datacentres entirely using sustainable energy, with Wednesday’s meeting of national cabinet flagging carve outs for jurisdictions including Queensland and the Northern Territory. Anthony Albanese welcomed the “positive and construction” discussions in Sydney, but opened the door to a flexible approach under new nationally consistent standards to deal with AI development, including for governments with state-owned power systems. Continue reading...

‘This is crazy. This is insane’: Bill Gates has changed his mind about AI and jobs Aug 26, 2026, 3:00am EDT Technology PostEmailWhatsapp The News Bill Gates says it’s time to hit the AI panic button. The technology has…

Drive-By Agent Hijacking: One Website Visit, Persistent Model Poisoning CustomersPricing Back Back Back Back Get a demo Elad Luz Ofek Itach Nemoclaw CVE-2026-65105: One Website Visit to Hijack Your AI Agent A vulnerabil…

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<blockquote cite="https://pauldix.com/the-end-of-programming"><p>The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="https://pauldix.com/the-end-of-programming">Paul Dix</a>, The end of programming</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents">coding-agents</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming">ai-assisted-programming</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/bun">bun</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a></p>

NewPower reliable AI agents with accurate, relevant data Read the blog > NewBuild software faster with AI agents—without losing control Read the blog > Blog home How We Used AI to Bring MongoDB to DynamoDB August 24, 20…

Limits of robot autonomy The fact that many events still permitted humans to directly control robotic motions shows that autonomous robot systems still have a long way to go, Patel said. Whereas humans can quickly learn…

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Prompt First-person perspective, plummeting at high speed through a cosmic waterfall of stars, then lightning-fast reaching out to touch a planet, triggering an explosive white light. The camera plunges vertically at ex…

5 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google A Russian Molniya drone carrying an Nvidia Jetson Orin module crashed and killed three civilians at a gas station in Zaporizhzhia last month after…

Make every site work for you. Describe the outcome. Retriever AI works across the open web and the sites you’re signed into, then brings back the finished result. Add to Chrome⭐⭐⭐⭐4⭐Run in cloud 7M+ tasks automated#1 on…

← Back to blog Can AI Music Tools Really Replace Epidemic Sound? An Honest Look MuseGen Team 7/30/2026 #Epidemic Sound alternative#AI music vs stock music#royalty-free AI music#AI music for creators If you make videos,…

IBM has released Granite 4.2, a family of open reasoning language models in 3B, 8B, and 30B sizes, all under Apache 2.0. Every model exposes a thinking / low-effort / non-thinking switch and native tool calling. The 8B and 30B additionally go through an agentic RL block that trains them to edit code, drive a terminal, and run web searches inside real sandboxed environments. The 30B reports 57.00 on SWE-Bench Verified and 29.24 on Terminal-Bench 2.1. The post IBM Releases Granite 4.2: Bringing Native Reasoning and Agentic RL to Open Enterprise Models appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Now Perplexity is trying to get into the local AI action Amid talk of an Nvidia deal, the AI search biz is looking beyond the cloud Thomas Claburn Thomas Claburn AI AND SOFTWARE REPORTER Published wed 26 Aug 2026 // 00:…

Hey all, The goal is to earn on token margins for LLM calls when you build an AI-powered webapp. I proxy OpenAI and Anthropic calls so that when you deploy a site to a subdomain, your users token usage will be tracked.…

The vast majority of the global public wants international cooperation on human rights, climate and AI. Like-minded countries must stand together to deliver Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is already having to make one of his gravest decisions. He has to issue the instructions that he alone gives to the military, setting out the UK response in a doomsday scenario of a nuclear weapons attack on us. He will, as I did two decades ago, sign a piece of paper telling commanders whether or not to retaliate and, if so, whether through targeting civilian conurbations or military sites. These instructions are written down in the aptly named “letter of last resort”. Now, more than at any time since the 1960s Cuban missile crisis, the European public fears a third world war. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock developed by atomic scientists moving ever closer to midnight, and Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Poland and Germany contemplating either acquiring nuclear weapons or siting them on their soil, our world is descending from a rules-based order to a power-based one, where might is deemed right and brute force dominates. Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010 The future starts with us: Gordon Brown in conversation On Thursday 10 September, join Hugh Muir and Gordon Brown to discuss the intricate connections between global instability and civic decline, as explored in Brown’s new book, The Future Starts With Us. Book tickets here Continue reading...

arXiv:2608.23994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-robot teaching focuses on enabling nontechnical experts to customize robots according to their needs after deployment. With recent advances in machine learning, human-robot teaching is no longer confined to offline learning where the data gathering step from a human teacher is separated from when the robot learns. Instead, more recent approaches for human-robot teaching focus on coupling human teaching with robot learning. This coupling impacts the structure, timing, and content of the teaching and learning interaction. However, it is currently unclear how such coupling dynamics affect humanrobot teaching effectiveness and human perceptions towards the teaching process. Informed by human learning theories, in this paper we propose a new scale for classifying human-robot teaching interactions according to coupling dynamics present between the human teacher and robot learner. We apply this scale to a subset of the human-robot teaching literature to identify how coupling dynamics and human teacher mental model mismatches with the ground truth robot learning system affect teaching effectiveness and human perceptions towards the teaching process

arXiv:2608.23983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic fruit harvesting must hold produce securely without bruising it, yet compression stiffness varies several-fold with ripeness within a single species, so no fixed grip force spans the range. Rather than tune force, we bound deformation: a controller closes the gripper until the object's estimated compression strain reaches a user-specified limit $\varepsilon$, using only the encoder position and motor-effort signal on every servo gripper---no tactile or force-torque sensor. Dividing an effort-based contact force by a lower bound on object stiffness makes the stop provably conservative---true compression stays at or below $\varepsilon$---for any $\varepsilon$ above a contact-detection strain floor we identify and quantify: robust detection itself spends compression, linearly in closing speed, making speed an explicit throughput--gentleness knob. Unlike a hand-tuned force threshold, $\varepsilon$ is a certified, size-scaling, operator-interpretable damage limit, and a ready safe-action parameter for learned grasping policies. In MuJoCo simulation over a realistic fruit-stiffness range, under a sensor-noise model calibrated to the real servo, the controller holds $\ge 98\,\%$ grasp at $0\,\%$ damage across all medium-to-firm stiffnesses for the entire certified $\varepsilon$ range, which neither fixed-force baseline attains; on stiffness-graded 3D-printed TPU cubes it matches baseline grasp success at roughly half the grip force and cuts soft-object damage from $100\,\%$ to $40\,\%$.

arXiv:2608.23972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-aware motion planning remains a challenge in robotics, especially when missions are time-critical and are under complex specifications. In this paper, we propose safety-aware-stl-mppi, a computationally efficient sampling-based receding-horizon planning framework designed to promote satisfaction of constraints expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL). Our approach encodes discrete-time STL formulas into candidate time-varying control barrier functions (CBF), which are integrated into a model predictive path integral (MPPI) controller. Our method inherits the benefits of low computational cost from an efficiently parallelizable sampling based planner and utilizes CBF for constraints expressed in STL. We compare against several MPPI baselines using four artificial Mars Rover planning case studies with a diverse environment and cost setups, where we show our method consistently achieving high safety and efficiency. We show a quadcopter planning experiment with NVIDIA Isaac Lab.

arXiv:2608.23887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent-conditioned adaptive policies can control robots across changing dynamics, but their learned latents remain internal representations of the policy rather than physical models that can be inspected, rolled out, or used by other control modules. This limits closed-loop analysis, diagnosis, and further improvement of a fixed policy. A direct mapping from latent to physical parameters is also under-specified, because multiple systems can induce similar closed-loop behavior. We therefore decode each operational latent into a distribution of quadrotor models using conditional flow matching. The decoded distribution enables two downstream uses without modifying the policy: online predictive tuning of a high-level controller around the fixed low-level policy, and robustness analysis under specified disturbances. Under perturbed actuator dynamics, decoded-model predictive tuning reduces position tracking RMSE by $23\%$ and heading RMSE by $45\%$ relative to fixed gains. Under Gaussian force disturbances, decoded-model ensembles closely predict the lateral tracking-error evolution. Together, these results show that control latents can be converted into physical model ensembles for tuning, robustness analysis, and diagnosis of frozen adaptive policies.

arXiv:2608.23863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots are beginning to act on world-model predictions, yet reliability is still expressed through instantaneous, model-internal signals. DreamLedger instead treats reliability as a persistent deployment object: an execution-settled credit file recording how often consumed predictions are borne out, indexed by operating condition, region, and prediction horizon, and consulted before each use. Each consumed prediction is registered as a claim; attributable outcomes are settled against arriving reality at zero labeling cost, an attribution stage excludes measurement-contaminated outcomes, and a settlement-supervised head complements sparse bins. The resulting credit gates consumption: low-credit predictions shorten the dependent horizon or trigger additional observation; every reliance event remains auditable via dependency tickets and replayable logs. We evaluate DreamLedger in three simulated domains (indoor flight, tabletop manipulation, 2D navigation), via mounts on unmodified DreamerV3, TD-MPC2, and V-JEPA 2-AC, and on a real Franka manipulator. Claim failure is dose-monotone in all 12 held-out condition-horizon cells. Credit-gated planning reduces burned imagination (consumed claims that later fail to redeem) by 62% (95% CI 43-81%) versus blind consumption, with equal success and comparable collision rates. At matched risk targets, persistent books cut verification probes from 1.00 to 0.36/episode in manipulation, at success 0.94 versus 0.98; settlement-grounded calibration retains moderate, seed-consistent operating points unlike raw instantaneous gates. The same trust layer operates across decoder-, latent-, and token-space interfaces, including V-JEPA 2-AC settled on real robot frames. On hardware, settlement remains operational under real sensing and contact noise, a deployment failure loop is re-priced online, and all 1,062 registered spends replay from the audit logs.

arXiv:2608.23839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Agents System (EAS) are increasingly deployed in open-world physical domains, where reliability directly dictates deployment quality and human-agent trust. However, existing evaluations rely on outcome-centric metrics as success rate or safety scores that collapse diverse execution trajectories into coarse scores, obscuring the dynamic processes underlying agent behavior. Therefore, they ignore a critical property of EAS -- which we define as the Resilience -- that reflects how EASs recover, stabilize, and extend under perturbations and across iterative updates. The lack of resilience is particularly critical in open-world environments due to continuous unexpected disruptions, thus directly affecting the quality of EAS deployment. To address this problem, we gain insight from the resilience-engineering concepts to EAS groundings and propose a novel resilience evaluation framework that can be flexibly applied to any EAS. Specifically, we define the first comprehensive resilience metrics suite for EASs system that exposes Rebound, Stability, and Graceful Extensibility across embodied tasks execution, providing a practical grounding for EAS resilience analysis. We further implement the resilience evaluation layer that transforms execution process into assessments for diagnosis and optimization. Across 400 household tasks with 10 EAS, we reveal the process-level distinction hidden by outcome metrics, including recovery cost differences among successful episodes ($\Delta C_{rec}=25.2$), increased instability and task-family degradation. Metrics-guided optimizations reduce recovery cost and increase stability, graceful extensibility completion, showing the diagnostic effect of resilience evaluation. Our results reveal a trade-off among resilience characteristics, suggesting that a resilient EAS construction should be configured according to deployment-specific requirements.

arXiv:2608.23831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While reinforcement learning (RL) allows generalist robot policies to continually improve during deployment, the large model size of modern generalist policies, such as VLAs, poses a fundamental obstacle to effective RL improvement. In particular, their severe inference latency---which can lead to pauses or jerky movements---can alter the effective environment dynamics and, if not correctly accounted for, break the Markov assumption that RL relies on, causing standard RL algorithms to fail completely. In this work, we introduce a latency-aware framework, Asynchronous RL with Intermediate Information (ARLI), that enables RL-based improvement of generalist policies under inference delays. Our framework builds on asynchronous inference approaches, which interleave action generation with execution to hide latency, and addresses its incompatibility with RL by providing a low-latency RL policy design that maximizes reactivity within the inference window through two contributions: state augmentations that restore near-Markovian structure by incorporating committed actions and a mid-inference observation. We evaluate our approach across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, and find that it enables effective finetuning under inference delays where standard RL fails entirely, even matching or exceeding the performance of standard RL in idealized no-latency settings.

arXiv:2608.23650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The perception of 3D space by mobile robots is rapidly moving from flat metric grid representations to hybrid metric-semantic graphs built from human-interpretable concepts. While most approaches first build metric maps and then add semantic layers, we explore an alternative, concept-first architecture in which spatial understanding emerges from asynchronous concept agents that directly instantiate and manage semantic entities. Our robot employs two spatial concepts (room and door), implemented as autonomous processes within a cognitive distributed architecture. These concept agents cooperatively build a shared scene graph representation of indoor layouts through active exploration and incremental validation. The key architectural principle is hierarchical constraint propagation: Room instantiation provides geometric and semantic priors to guide and support door detection within wall boundaries. The resulting structure is maintained by a complementary functional principle based on prediction-matching loops. This approach is designed to yield an actionable, human-interpretable spatial representation without relying on any pre-existing global metric map, supporting scalable operation and persistent, task-relevant understanding in structured indoor environments.

arXiv:2608.23629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Creating symbolic operators by hand is one of the main bottlenecks in deploying Task and Motion Planning systems (TAMP). Recent works show that these operators can instead be learned directly from demonstration data. Existing methods, however, typically learn each action in isolation and cannot capture the recurring multi-step structure of manipulation tasks, so the search becomes intractable on long sequential tasks. A further inefficiency arises in the symbolic state: every provided predicate is evaluated at every search node, even when it never appears in any learned operator. We present a system that addresses both problems together. Its central component is the automatic generation of macro-operators, composite actions that compress a recurring sequence of individual actions into a single planning step. Our system discovers causally linked action pairs directly from the training data, where one action produces exactly the condition that the next one requires, and turns each pair into a new operator. Alongside this, our system prunes every predicate that no learned operator references, which shrinks the symbolic state evaluated at each search node. Together, these changes shorten the effective planning horizon, and the benefit they bring grows with the length of the task. Across four TAMP domains, our method reaches up to a 4.6x planning speedup compared to the baseline method, namely Learning Operators for TAMP. More importantly, it solves a long sequential task that the baseline cannot solve. Macro-operator discovery thus not only accelerates planning but, in certain domains, determines solvability in practice.

arXiv:2608.23575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We convert drone-vision annotation streams into virtual swarm-game states without controlling physical drones. VisDrone and UAVSwarm metadata are compressed into a Bloom representation; deterministic probes produce bounded capability vectors, image-space formations, finite zero-sum payoffs, and human-readable visual overlays. The audit scales from $6\times 6$ to $32\times 32$ finite games and adds a repeated Markov layer with stock, fatigue, adaptation, exposure, stress, budget, data-growth, model-improvement, and entropy-budget state variables. Local screen tuning raises robust screen security from $0.526$ to $0.593$, and the $32\times 32$ tuned screen reaches value $0.616$. A field readout audit shows that fixed-pixel rasters do not improve monotonically: $128\times 128$ accuracy is $67.2\%$ and hotspot error is $0.136$. The diagnosed error is shrinking image-plane bandwidth. A finite empirical-risk encoder over scale-normalized Gaussian bandwidths selects a scale-normalized encoder with $\lambda=1.50$, reaching $77.6\%$ accuracy at $128\times 128$ and reducing joint loss by $0.185$. A server-side audit checks $16{,}777{,}216$ target-localization states, and a 32-round repeated-game audit over $16{,}777{,}216$ trajectories selects a budget-adaptive policy with value $0.461$.

arXiv:2608.23752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The growing size of Convolutional Neural Networks has led to increasingly large and costly models. Knowledge Distillation (KD) addresses this by transferring knowledge from a large network (teacher) to a small one (student), also reducing the training data required. KD is traditionally applied only at the network's final output. However, its behaviour when applied at intermediate network layers has received little attention. This raises the question of whether intermediate block-wise KD, which provides supervision throughout the network, could offer an advantage under specific conditions, such as few instances per class, which is common in fine-grained datasets. This work proposes a student design based on simple, homogeneous blocks mirroring those of the teacher, distilling knowledge between corresponding blocks. Across eleven datasets, we show that on classic datasets, distilling only the last block is sufficient -- and often best--, whereas fine-grained, data-scarce settings benefit substantially from intermediate supervision, with even a single additional distillation point narrowing the gap considerably. We further study how this supervision should be guided, exploring configurations of varying granularity and informed by an explainability analysis based on attention maps, Centered Kernel Alignment, and Grad-CAM, alongside the impact of teacher and student fine-tuning strategies. This work shows that intermediate block-wise distillation, guided appropriately, is key to building compact data-efficient models without sacrificing accuracy.

arXiv:2608.23746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State space models, especially Visual State Space Duality (VSSD), have emerged as efficient linear-time alternatives to Transformers for dense visual tasks. However, we observe that VSSD compresses spatial context into a global aggregation that suppresses high-frequency responses, causing excessive boundary smoothing in remote sensing semantic segmentation. To address this, we propose CRISP, a calibration framework with two components. Its core, the Duality Calibration Operator (DCO), restores local contrast and boundary responses through residual injection and frequency calibration within the VSSD backbone, without altering its linear complexity. To retain the recovered detail, an Orthogonal Multi-Prototype (OMP) head assigns multiple orthogonally constrained prototypes per class to model large intra-class variance. Extensive experiments on Potsdam, Vaihingen, and LoveDA show that, with approximately 30M parameters, CRISP achieves consistent gains in mean F1 (mF) and mIoU while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/crazylifeha/CRISP.

arXiv:2608.23730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We grade MDS-UPDRS gait severity from SMPL motion using three frozen MotionAGFormer encoders as featurizers, reaching macro-F1 0.58 on a hidden, multi-site test set. Because the system's members differ only in their lifting corpus, evaluating encoders singly on that test set isolates what that corpus contributes. Six pools drawn from one inertial dataset, varying only in which walking tasks they include, score between 0.32 and 0.53, and just one of them beats the 0.51 of an encoder given no outside motion at all. What separates them is not how much data they hold but whether they carry a contrast in walking speed, the variation this representation appears to depend : a further pool adding a third collection site at fixed task composition does worse still. The same rule explains why exact synthetic motion and monocularly reconstructed web video both fail to help. Modifying the learned representation itself, rather than the corpus behind it, cost every variant that attempted it.