PaW

'Doctors strikes' and 'paw prints in space'

'Doctors strikes' and 'paw prints in space'

A round-up of stories from local newspapers and the BBC from the past week in the West of England.

When Does Complexity Conditioning Help a Frozen Sentence Embedding? A Controlled Study of Per-Sentence and Pair-Level Difficulty Adaptation

Announce Type: new Abstract: A common intuition is that sentence embeddings should adapt to the difficulty of the input. We test this intuition in a controlled, multi-seed setting: a lightweight post-encoder adapter attaches to a frozen Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B encoder, accessing only its final pooled embedding, and is evaluated on four paraphrase and semantic-similarity tasks (PAWS, MRPC, QQP, STS-B). The naive form of the idea fails: surface-based per-sentence complexity is nearly uncorrelated...

BBC goes inside Myanmar with rebel fighters

Rebels fighting the military government in Myanmar have told the BBC they're losing ground because of a shortage of manpower and equipment. Also: after exchanging attacks overnight, the US and Iran accuse each other of damaging negotiations; Afghanistan says Pakistan killed 13 civilians in cross-border air strikes; police in South Africa launch a manhunt after 12 people are shot dead; and how you can tell if your dog favours using one paw over another. The Global News Podcast brings you the...

Lady Gaga's tattoos explained: Stories behind her iconic ink

Lady Gaga's body is a diary. Every tattoo she has ever gotten tells you something true about where she was, who she loved, what she survived, or what she believed in at that exact moment in her life. With over two dozen pieces of ink spread almost entirely across the left side of her body, the story written on her skin is just as layered as the music she has spent her career making.

Policy and World Modeling Co-Training for Language Agents

Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) improves large language model (LLM) agents by teaching them which actions lead to high rewards, but provides little supervision on what those actions do to the environment. World modeling (WM) can fill this gap, yet existing approaches often require separate simulators, extra training stages, or additional inference-time computation. We observe that on-policy RL rollouts already contain the needed signal: each transition pairs an...

Dog rescued after being swept out to sea and surviving 800m swim to remote island

Dog rescued after being swept out to sea and surviving 800m swim to remote island Dog ‘played hide and seek’ as rescuers approached him - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Rescuers in Australia’s New South Wales were called into action after receiving an unusual emergency report: a dog had been swept off the rocks in Batemans Bay and was struggling in the ocean. By the time the rescue team reached the area, the dog had already swum nearly 800m across the bay – a journey estimated to have...

Doubting Thomas

Footsteps ran up the stairs. I clutched at my bottle. Then someone banged on my bedroom door.

Valve's Steam Deck is back in stock after months, but you won't like it

Dogs uncover invasive pests that experts missed in real-world vineyard tests

Dogs uncover invasive pests that experts missed in real-world vineyard tests Sadie Harley Scientific Editor Robert Egan Associate Editor At a Maryland vineyard, Debi Persing guided her Boston terrier, Xephyr, slowly down a row of grapevines. Vineyard workers and scientists had already identified several invasive spotted lanternfly egg masses hidden among the vines. They believed they had found them all.