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Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

FMSGOC uses vision-language foundation model priors plus diffusion reconstruction to enable generalizable semantic communication at 0.039 bits per pixel for 6G.

FMSGOC targets generalization failures in semantic and goal-oriented communication for 6G by leveraging broad visual-linguistic foundation model priors. A vision-language model selects sparse, goal-aligned semantic anchors while a fine-tuned diffusion model performs masked completion to reconstruct images at the receiver, decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct. On CIFAR-10 it reaches 0.039 bits per pixel with cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 and 0.83-0.86 on unseen ImageNet inputs, outperforming end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

The latest AI news we announced in August 2026

Google's August 2026 AI recap includes launches of Gemini 3.7 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, and the Pixel 11 series, plus 1 billion Gemini users.

Google's monthly recap covers the Gemini 3.7 Flash workhorse model for coding and agents, released three weeks after 3.6 Flash at half its per-million-token cost, and the Gemini app surpassing 1 billion monthly users. The Pixel 11 series launched with the Tensor G6 chip running Gemini Nano, alongside Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for real-time speech-to-text and Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash for studio-quality video generation. Other announcements include a free year of Google AI for college students, Gemma's 1 billion downloads, and AI weather forecasts for aviation contrail reduction.

Google · AI · 14d agoAI industry

TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation

TransNormal-2 improves monocular surface-normal estimation by fixing VAE edge degradation with geometry-aware losses and refinement, matching MoGe-2 with 1.4% of annotations.

TransNormal-2 is a FLUX.2-based rectified-flow framework for monocular surface-normal estimation with single-step deterministic inference. The authors quantify that VAE 8x spatial compression introduces 1.3-8.5 degrees of mean angular error even on ground-truth normals, with edge error up to 2.8x the global error. The method adds geometry-aware pixel-space losses and an RGB-guided Geometric Refinement Module to correct boundary-localized decoding errors. It matches or exceeds MoGe-2 on all eight reported metrics using only 1.4% as many task-specific annotations, and cuts transparent-object MAE by 4.2 degrees on ClearGrasp and 3.1 degrees on ClearPose.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Forgery of C2PA on a Pixel 10

Researcher forged a Google Pixel 10 C2PA content credential with genuine signatures, showing root-level attackers can fake photo provenance.

A Hacker Factor blog post demonstrates an AI-generated 'unicorn glitter milk' news photo carrying a valid, cryptographically signed C2PA manifest traceable to Google's Pixel camera certificate chain, passing validation in Adobe Inspect and the CAI Verify tool with a verified timestamp. The author, working with UMBC's PASAWG working group, reported to Google and C2PA in November 2025 that root access on a Pixel device could sign arbitrary images as camera captures; after 90 days without resolution, details were published. The finding undermines C2PA Assurance Level 2 claims made for Pixel 10 Content Credentials.

Lobsters · security · 2h agoResearch

Get closer to the game with Gemini and Pixel

Google's Gemini and Pixel partner with five global football clubs to add AI-powered features to the matchday fan experience.

Google announced partnerships between its Gemini AI and Pixel smartphone lines and five global football clubs. The collaboration aims to elevate the fan matchday experience through AI and smartphone technology. The announcement is primarily a consumer marketing effort rather than a security-relevant development.

Google · AI · Aug 17, 2026AI industry

Android 0-day Vulnerability on Google Pixel Devices Actively Exploited in Attacks

Google patched CVE-2026-58704, an actively exploited Android zero-day allowing proximal privilege escalation via the Pixel cellular modem, urging the 2026-09-05 patch.

Google confirmed CVE-2026-58704, a high-severity elevation-of-privilege flaw in the Pixel cellular modem, is being exploited in limited, targeted attacks and shipped emergency fixes in the September 2026 Pixel Update Bulletin. The low-complexity bug requires no user interaction and enables proximal/adjacent privilege escalation with no additional execution privileges, phrasing Google has historically used for spyware-vendor and state-aligned zero-days. The Pixel bulletin patches 110 flaws including 12 critical RCEs, while the broader September Android update addressed roughly 180 vulnerabilities, including Wi-Fi memory-corruption bug CVE-2026-28662.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 48m agofirst · 5h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-58704CVE-2026-28662

Try Google Pics: Easy image creation and editing in Google Workspace

Google rolls out Pics, a Nano Banana-based image creation and editing tool, to Workspace subscribers with integrations in Docs, Slides, and Drive.

Google Pics, built on the Nano Banana image generation model, is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers. Features include object segmentation, in-image text editing and translation, collaboration, and multiple generations per prompt. Integrations launched in Docs and Slides, with Drive support planned in the coming weeks.

Google · AI · 14d agoAI industry

Cardinal RAT Sins Again, Targets Israeli Fin

Unit 42 documents updated Cardinal RAT attacks against Israeli FinTech firms, using BMP steganography, MD5-hash obfuscation, and process injection to hinder analysis and detection.

Unit 42 tracked a series of attacks using an updated Cardinal RAT (version 1.7.2) targeting the Israeli financial technology sector. The .NET loader hides a second-stage DLL inside an embedded BMP image decrypted with a single-byte XOR key, and the payload renames functions, methods, and variables to MD5 hashes for obfuscation. The malware installs a startup-folder LNK file and injects its final payload into RegSvcs.exe or RegAsm.exe, communicating with affiliatecollective[.]club over port 443. A possible relationship with the EVILNUM JavaScript malware used against similar organizations was also noted.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Malware1

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Third-Party Script Security: How Tags, Pixels, and Embeds Can Put Websites at Risk

Sucuri details how third-party tags, pixels, and embeds expand website attack surface, letting compromised vendors read data and alter pages.

The article explains that third-party scripts used for analytics, ads, chat, payments, and video can read page content, collect visitor data, and change what users see. A compromise of the vendor, account, or integration configuration can affect every page loading the script. It recommends inventorying scripts, understanding their purpose and ownership, and detecting unexpected changes rather than removing useful integrations.

Sucuri Blog · 22d agoResearch

VDiff-Bench: A Challenging Benchmark for Fine-Grained Image Difference Identification

VDiff-Bench, a 1,756-question benchmark, shows multimodal LLMs struggle with fine-grained image-difference identification, scoring as low as 8.7% on low-level changes.

VDiff-Bench is a multiple-choice benchmark of 1,756 four-way questions over image pairs covering 10 change categories including position, motion, color, texture, OCR/text and illumination, with curated hard negatives. Evaluation of 11 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source MLLMs shows fine-grained visual comparison remains brittle: 7-8B-scale open-source models score 52.5-70.6% on semantic changes but only 8.7-33.3% on low-level changes like noise and texture. Notably, Grok 4.3 shows a sharp performance drop on noise and texture differences, falling behind large open-source models like Kimi K2.5 and K3.

Hugging Face daily papers · 11d agoAI research

Top 10 Best Browser Isolation Solutions in 2026

A 2026 market overview ranks ten remote browser isolation tools, with Menlo Security as the pure-play reference as SSE vendors bundle isolation.

The article compares ten remote browser isolation (RBI) options, including Menlo Security, Zscaler, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom (Symantec), Forcepoint, Skyhigh Security, Ericom (Cradlepoint), Authentic8, and Garrison. It argues that RBI has become a bundled policy action inside SSE platforms from Zscaler, Cloudflare, Palo Alto, Broadcom, Forcepoint, and Skyhigh, compressing standalone pricing and driving consolidation such as Ericom's isolation moving under Cradlepoint (Ericsson). Enterprise browsers like Island and Chrome Enterprise Premium are reshaping the RBI-versus-browser decision for managed users, while selective policy-driven isolation of risky categories is described as the prevailing 2026 architecture. The piece is a buyer's guide with vendor positioning, not an incident or vulnerability report.

Cyber Security News · 5d agoIndustry

Mi-Ripple: Restoring Images Degraded by Iterative AI Editing

Mi-Ripple is a diagnosis-guided restoration workflow that removes digital ripple artifacts introduced by iterative AI image editing while preserving structure.

Iterative reference-conditioned image editing can introduce grid-like and granular textures known as digital ripple. Mi-Ripple separates periodic lattice artifacts from content-entangled granular texture, then applies selective spectral notching, structure-aware smoothing, and cleaned-reference regeneration. In fourteen notch-only executions, whole-image residual standard deviation was 0.08-0.44 in CIELAB lightness units, and reference cleaning reduced output debris density by 45% in a paired example.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalognew

CISA added actively exploited Google Pixel improper authorization flaw CVE-2026-58704 to its KEV catalog, mandating federal remediation.

CISA added CVE-2026-58704, an improper authorization vulnerability in Google Pixel devices, to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog based on evidence of active exploitation. Under BOD 26-04, Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies must prioritize remediation of KEV-listed vulnerabilities on exposed assets. CISA urges all organizations to prioritize patching KEV entries.

CISA Advisoriesupdated · 1h agofirst · 3h agoExploit / PoC in the wild 17 sourcesCVE-2026-58704

27.5KB language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter

A developer released gpu-lexer, a 27.5KB language-agnostic syntax highlighter that uses a tiny WebGPU model to label code tokens in the browser.

gpu-lexer splits source into words, whitespace, and symbols, then a small WebGPU model uses local and whole-file context to assign nine token classes, working on languages never seen in training. On held-out files, 12.57% of token labels differ from Shiki, though this measures agreement with Shiki rather than objective correctness. In benchmarks against Shiki 4.4.3, Prism.js, Highlight.js, Sugar High, and Starry Night, it highlighted 10 concatenated copies of three.min.js (5.56M characters) about 10x faster on an Apple M4 Pro in Chrome 152. The author frames it as an experiment, not a grammar-equivalent highlighter.

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

Apple’s new iPhone camera mode promises to prove your photo isn’t AI

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro adds a Reference Image mode that cryptographically signs camera sensor pixels to prove photos were not AI-generated or edited.

Apple will launch a Reference Image mode with the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, using the new camera sensor to sign every pixel and develop the signed data via Private Cloud Compute into an unalterable reference image viewable in Photos. Users can compare the reference image against edited versions to verify authenticity, building on provenance standards like SynthID, C2PA, and Meta's Content Seal. A Reference Image API will span iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for third-party apps, though the feature launches without EU support, arriving there in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

The Verge · AIupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI industry 6 sources

Multi-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face details building and using multi-vector late-interaction embedding models with Sentence Transformers for retrieval workloads.

Hugging Face published a guide on multi-vector, late-interaction embedding models (ColBERT-style) supported through Sentence Transformers. The post covers how practitioners can build and use these models for retrieval and RAG pipelines. It is a developer tooling and technique write-up, not a security advisory.

Hugging Face Blog · 29d agoAI tools & infra1

Marigold V2: Revisiting Diffusion Transformers for Monocular Depth Estimation

Marigold V2 adapts diffusion transformers for monocular depth estimation, improving AbsRel 16-26% over the previous best on KITTI and ETH3D.

Huawei's Bayer lab revisits the Marigold approach to repurpose image generation and editing models built on the diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture into monocular depth estimators. The recipes target single-step inference from pretrained multi-step flow-matching models, with remedies including alignment to ground-truth semantic features and a two-stage fine-tuning protocol using a Sinkhorn-based loss. The resulting model produces crisper depth maps that generalize out-of-distribution and also achieves state-of-the-art results on surface normals estimation and intrinsic image decomposition.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

WeWorm – First 0-Click Worm Spreading Through WeChat Calls Across iOS and Android

Researchers demonstrated WeWorm, a zero-click worm exploiting a memory-corruption flaw in WeChat's VoIP stack to spread via calls across iOS and Android.

Security firm Calif published WeWorm, a proof-of-concept zero-click worm exploiting a memory-corruption bug in WeChat's VoIP stack to spread through voice calls on iOS and Android without the victim answering. The demo chained a Pixel 10a, an iPhone 17e, and a second Pixel 10a, compromising each device while the call was still ringing and giving full control of the WeChat account. The attacker must already be on the victim's friend list, but compromised contacts become the propagation layer across a platform with over 1.4 billion monthly users. Calif reported the bug to Tencent in July 2026, and Tencent has since mitigated it; full technical details are withheld for a later conference presentation.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoExploit / PoC

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers introduce TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling zero-shot language-guided humanoid navigation on the Unitree G1 robot.

TANGO addresses humanoid navigation in cluttered indoor environments by predicting 29-DoF joint-space actions directly from natural-language instructions and egocentric RGB, rather than 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation via a pipeline combining global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. In simulation it achieves state-of-the-art vision-language navigation performance and transfers zero-shot to a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation data.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers present TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling humanoid robots to traverse cluttered spaces from language instructions.

TANGO predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions from egocentric RGB observations and natural-language instructions for whole-body humanoid navigation, going beyond 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation using global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. The model reports state-of-the-art simulation performance and was deployed zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation training data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

A Malicious SIM Card Can Run Attacker Code Inside the Modems Behind Cellular IoT Devices

Researchers showed malicious SIM cards can issue RUN AT commands to execute code on Qualcomm modems, compromising Quectel-based cellular IoT devices like EV chargers.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham and Fuzzware found 9 of 26 tested devices accept SIM proactive commands, including six Qualcomm-based cellular modules, five of them Quectel. They achieved code execution on a commercial Autel EV charger via the Quectel EC25's atfwd_daemon unsafe format string, and demonstrated an irreversible 2G downgrade, modem power-off, and arbitrary file reads via a root TFTP daemon on a Quectel EG25-G. Attacks require a hostile SIM already in the slot or an interposer; no attacks have been reported in the wild. Qualcomm has built a hardened configuration disabling the interface by default and Quectel mitigated the file-access flaw; the paper was presented at USENIX WOOT.

The Hacker News · Aug 11, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2025-48618

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison · 11d agoAI research

WeChat Worm Can Hijack Accounts Without Victims Answering Calls

Researchers demoed WeWorm, a zero-click WeChat worm hijacking accounts via incoming VoIP calls using a memory corruption flaw; Tencent patched it in August.

Researchers at Calif exploited a memory corruption bug in WeChat's VoIP system, taking over accounts through an incoming call even if the victim never answers or touches the phone. The attacker must already be a WeChat contact, but compromising a friend's account bypasses this, and chained calls spread the worm across three Android and iOS test phones in seconds. Tencent fixed the flaw in Android 8.0.77 and iOS 8.0.76 released in August, and researchers found no evidence of real-world exploitation. WeChat and Weixin reported 1.418 billion combined monthly active users at the end of 2025.

Security Affairs · 7d agoExploit / PoC

ReMoMask-2: Latent Retrieval-Augmented Masked Motion Generation

ReMoMask-2 rebuilds retrieval in the generator's latent space for text-to-motion generation, achieving lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen.

ReMoMask-2 is a retrieval-augmented text-to-motion framework that constructs its retrieval database directly in the generator's pre-quantization latent space and aligns text queries through a distilled lightweight projector, eliminating the representation gap. The framework combines Hierarchical Bidirectional Momentum contrastive learning, Semantic Spatial-Temporal Attention, and Topology Structured Masking to handle hierarchical motion structure. The retriever achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, and ReMoMask-2 attains the lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen, with a single mask-transformer stage outperforming the previous two-stage pipeline while delivering the fastest inference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

SyncWorld: Visual Calibration Enables World Models as Zero-Shot Simulators

SyncWorld is an action-conditioned world model acting as a zero-shot robotics simulator across unseen environments via visual calibration.

Researchers propose SyncWorld, an action-conditioned world model that simulates robot action outcomes in unseen environments without additional training. It uses a visual calibration episode of paired frames and actions to establish the setup-specific Action-Visual Mapping in context. Experiments show accurate simulation of action outcomes in novel settings and that simulated rollouts enable test-time policy improvement without training.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

Evaluation of 2-8B VLMs (Qwen3-VL, Gemma3) against BioCLIP on camera-trap species ID shows all models degrade sharply on field imagery.

The study tests whether edge-deployable 2-8B vision-language models carry genuine taxonomic knowledge, comparing Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B and Gemma3 4B against the 300M specialist BioCLIP on a 96-species task across clean iNaturalist photos and six LILA.science camera-trap collections. All models degrade 9.6-26.6 percentage points on field imagery, and BioCLIP outperforms every VLM by 33.2-59.2 points on an expanded 200-image sample, suggesting specialized data rather than scale drives the gap. Under open-set prompting, 5.9-9.6% of responses are syntactically valid but taxonomically nonexistent species names, with fabrication rankings replicating across evaluation sets.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

Upatre Continued to Evolve with new Anti

Unit 42 analyzes an undocumented Upatre downloader variant with VM detection via process hashing, packed code, disabled Windows defenses and Namecoin .bit C2 domains.

Unit 42 analyzed an Upatre downloader variant compiled in December 2016 that went largely undetected by automated systems, featuring heavy code flow obscuration, on-demand decryption of network communications, and novel virtual machine detection. The sample enumerates running processes, computes CRC32 hashes XORed with a hard-coded key, and sleeps if analysis-related processes such as vmtoolsd.exe or python.exe are found. It masquerades with Google Chrome icons, disables Windows Defender, Firewall and other security services, injects code into msiexec.exe, and resolves .bit Namecoin domains like bookreader[.]bit via hardcoded OpenNIC DNS servers over TCP.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Malware1

Right Tool, Right Job: Native-Language Evaluation, Tokenizer Sensitivity, and Methodological Findings from a French-Only BabyLM

French BabyLM entry METRON-FR (125M GPT-2, 92.47M words) shows tokenizer artifacts dominate child-scale zero-shot evaluation; proposes standard diagnostics.

METRON-FR is a 125M-parameter GPT-2 pretrained on 92.47M French words, submitted to the BabyLM 2026 Strict track, scoring 85.97% on the native Quebec-French QFrBLiMP benchmark and 62.80% on the BabyLM-weighted leaderboard. A cross-lingual GLUE protocol combining French task-data translation with rank-16 LoRA shows relational tasks gain while world-knowledge tasks regress. Bilingual Lexicon Induction reaches p@1 of 68.84%, 18x above chance, and ablations show single-token zero-shot scoring is dominated by tokenizer and template artifacts at child scale.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 22h agoAI research

PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

PhysStream autoregressive video model enables physics-grounded mid-generation motion control, cutting trajectory error 12% and FVMD 33% versus strongest baselines.

PhysStream is an autoregressive image-to-video model that incorporates structured scene memory—positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames—and supports fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals encoding physical quantities. Training proceeds in two stages: a bidirectional model finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model with scene memory. It reduces motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines, and human evaluators prefer it in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons.

FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

FreeFlow is a bias-free hierarchical transformer achieving state-of-the-art optical flow results on Sintel, KITTI-2015, and Spring benchmarks.

FreeFlow replaces task-specific inductive biases like correlation volumes and iterative warping with a single feed-forward encoder-decoder combining window, shifted-window, and reduced-resolution global attention. It reaches 0.68/1.48 EPE on Sintel Clean/Final, 3.23 Fl-all on KITTI-2015, and 3.192 1px on Spring. The architecture scales consistently from small to large variants and remains memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

The Top 4 Threats We Found by Investigating Every Alert for a Quarter

Prophet Security's quarterly threat report finds identity attacks made up roughly half of confirmed malicious activity, with stolen authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access controls.

Between May 1 and July 31, 2026, Prophet Security investigated every alert in customer environments immediately on arrival; about 7% of completed investigations were confirmed malicious. Direct account/session attacks made up roughly 18% of confirmed activity, with replayed authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access since no re-authentication occurs. Infostealer activity affected about a quarter of investigated organizations, mostly delivered via browsers through compromised websites, malicious ads, sponsored search results and ClickFix fake CAPTCHA gates, with payloads including Lumma Stealer, Vidar, HijackLoader and AsyncRAT. Credential phishing was the largest category at about 28%, with adversary-in-the-middle relays revealed by seconds-long MFA approvals from distant countries and MFA fatigue attacks exploiting automatic unlock policies.

BleepingComputer · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild

Show HN: MultiMatte, a Promptable Image Background Removal Model

Feyn releases MultiMatte, a promptable background-removal model fine-tuned from Meta's SAM 3 via LoRA, outputting alpha mattes that beat SAM 3 on segmentation benchmarks.

Feyn introduced MultiMatte, a promptable image background-removal model built on Meta's SAM 3 (860M parameters). It modifies only 19.49M parameters (2.27%) using a rank-16 LoRA adapter and replaces binary masks with alpha mattes to handle fuzzy boundaries like hair. On the DIS-VD benchmark it scores 0.901 S-measure versus SAM 3's 0.667, and it improves on SAM 3 across all twelve evaluated splits. Training used 19,953 images for 14,000 steps with focal and Dice loss, and the merged weights are available via the nobg library and a web demo.

Illusion of Depth: Revealing Hidden Stereo Vision Vulnerabilities in Depth Estimation

Simple repeating patterns let attackers shift stereo-camera depth estimates by up to 20 meters, triggering emergency braking in autonomous driving frameworks at 40 km/h.

The paper reveals an intrinsic vulnerability in stereo cameras stemming from pixel sampling and calibration processes, letting attackers finely control estimated depth of real obstacles using simple repeating patterns without adversarial ML techniques. The attack was evaluated against BM and SGBM stereo matching algorithms, deep learning models PSMNet, MoCha-Stereo, and UniMatch, the stereo-LiDAR fusion model SGM-DDC, and commercial cameras ZED2 and Intel RealSense D435; on ZED2, obstacles can be displaced up to 20 meters farther or 12 meters closer. A 0.5-second attack triggered emergency braking in a popular autonomous driving framework, with feasibility confirmed at driving speeds up to 40 km/h using CARLA. State-of-the-art defenses proved ineffective, and the authors propose a similarity-score strategy to dynamically detect and suppress depth discrepancies.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Generative Late-Interaction Embeddings For Visual Document Retrieval

GLIE compresses visual document retrieval embeddings to four vectors per page while retaining nearly 80% of uncompressed nDCG@5 accuracy.

Researchers analyzing late-interaction retrieval embeddings found they lie exactly on the unit sphere and concentrate near a manifold of intrinsic dimension five to six. GLIE learns a few k vectors per page that serve as a lightweight index and a basis to regenerate the full embedding set for exact rescoring of top candidates at query time. On ViDoRe v1 with four vectors per page, GLIE retains nearly 80% of uncompressed nDCG@5 versus 70% for the best prior post-hoc method, using a 415K-parameter network trained in under three GPU-minutes on 1,000 pages.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a 552B-parameter multimodal MoE model with 1M-token context and KV cache cut to 890 bytes per token.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 552B-parameter backbone that activates 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decode. It uses a Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, Compressed Sparse Attention 2, and FP4 KV caching to reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token, roughly one quarter of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. The model was trained from scratch on 45T tokens with context extended to 1M tokens, includes an Engram conditional-memory module (196B parameters), and is released under the MIT license. Post-training uses SFT, RL, and on-policy distillation with large-scale automated synthesis of agentic tasks and a controllable reasoning effort setting from 1 to 100.

Hugging Face trending modelsupdated · 4d agofirst · 6d agoModel release 7 sources1

OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution

OracleZoom enables recursive extreme-scale image super-resolution via reference-constrained on-policy distillation, reducing hallucinations at deep zoom scales.

OracleZoom tackles recursive super-resolution, where repeated feeding of predictions back into the same model leaves deeper-scale outputs unsupervised as required source resolution grows geometrically. The framework trains on its own trajectory while carrying the last ground-truth evidence beyond the supervision boundary, combining direct and cross-scale supervision, a no-reference quality objective, a KL-constrained pretrained latent prior, and EMA consistency. Across seven datasets it achieves state-of-the-art SR quality across zoom scales, averaging 0.713 CLIPIQA with larger gains at deeper scales and significantly reduced hallucinations. Code, data, and models are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

RenderFormer-V2: Neural Rendering with Heterogeneous Scene Primitives

RenderFormer-V2 is a transformer-based neural renderer handling caustics, volumetric scattering and out-of-distribution materials without per-scene training or specialized code.

RenderFormer-V2 is a learned transformer-based neural rendering model that models global light transport as a sequence-to-sequence transformation, handling caustics, volumetric scattering, environment lighting, textured and displaced surfaces and out-of-distribution materials. It uses a two-stage process: a view-independent stage resolving primitive-to-primitive transport, and a view-dependent stage converting the neural scene representation into pixels. Improvements include combined windowed-attention with a rendering-informed attention sink for scalability, support for heterogeneous primitives like environment maps and participating media, and a surface-reflectance-independent neural material encoding, validated across diverse scenes with extensive ablations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research