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4 stories in the last 3d

What Breaks Local Watermarks? A Robustness Benchmark for Local Invisible Image Watermarking

First systematic robustness benchmark of five local invisible image watermarking methods across 55 transformations finds all are vulnerable, with inpainting and geometric misalignment completely breaking payload…

The paper presents the first systematic robustness benchmark for local invisible image watermarks, covering 55 image transformations across signal distortions, coordinate alignment changes, indirect local edits, and direct watermark edits. It evaluates five methods: MaskWM, WAM, OmniGuard, TrustMark, and PixelSeal, all supporting localization natively or with minimal adaptation. Results show every method is vulnerable to some transformation; MaskWM offers the strongest payload recovery and localization but the lowest clean-image quality, and synchronization further improves its recovery under geometric transformations. Geometric misalignment and generative local edits such as inpainting and outpainting can completely impair payload recovery, while signal distortions are often tolerated.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Founder’s cost-cutting obsession drove Unitree lead in cheap humanoid robots

Report details Unitree founder Wang Xingxing's extreme cost-cutting and micromanagement driving cheap humanoid robots amid record core staff attrition.

Caijing Magazine reporting portrays Unitree founder Wang Xingxing as a micromanaging, cost-obsessed leader who personally approves expenses over 100 yuan (~$15) and runs a penalty-heavy incentive system at the 480-employee humanoid robot maker. Employees report the highest attrition of core staff in company history during 2025-2026, and Wang scored every senior executive 1 out of 1.5. The company, which recently IPO'd and explores large AI models for physical AI autonomy, called the reporting misinformation without specifics.

Ars Technica · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’

EFF analysis found police searched Flock's 19,000-camera ALPR network using joke reasons like 'LMAO' and 'idk,' exposing routine warrantless surveillance abuse.

An EFF analysis of Flock audit logs, shared with 404 Media, found officers across dozens of jurisdictions searching over 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities with justifications like 'LMAO,' 'idk,' and keyboard gibberish between 2023 and late 2025. One Lake County, Indiana sheriff's deputy searched for a license plate across the entire network citing 'LMAO.' After outlets exposed searches targeting ICE detainees, an abortion patient, and protesters, officers were reportedly told to be 'as vague as permissible,' and Flock replaced the free-text reason box with a prepopulated drop-down list, which EFF called a loss for transparency. Departments rarely disciplined offending officers, and EFF concluded agencies cannot oversee themselves.

404 Media · 2d agoPolicy & legal

HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harness

Researchers introduce HarnessVLN, a zero-shot training-free agent harness that sets new training-free SOTA on vision-language navigation benchmarks including R2R and HM3D.

HarnessVLN is a zero-shot, training-free framework for embodied vision-language navigation that coordinates perception, retrieval, grounding, navigation, recovery, and termination through a unified tool interface. It validates planner proposals against spatial evidence, geometric feasibility, and subgoal consistency, using hierarchical event memory and a persistent Spatiotemporal Graph that stores reusable spatial evidence and failure annotations. It reports success rates of 60.8% on R2R, 53.9% on RxR, 76.0% on HM3D-v2, and 59.3% on HM3D-OVON, surpassing prior training-free state of the art, with real-world humanoid deployment demonstrated.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research