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Can Skills Learned in Games Transfer to Real-World Work?

Good Start Labs trains models in strategy games like 1830 and Diplomacy, showing terminal-agent training transfers to financial research benchmarks.

Good Start Labs, spun out of Every with $3.6M from General Catalyst and Inovia, trains AI models in verifiable strategy games. A 30B model trained as a multi-turn terminal agent in 1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons improved Finance-Agent benchmark performance, while single-turn QA training did not transfer. The founders also co-authored COS-PLAY, a paper on co-evolving LLM decision and skill-bank agents for long-horizon tasks.

Latent Space · 17h agoAI research

What Makes Adversarial Examples Transfer Across Deepfake Detectors?

A controlled study of 60 deepfake detectors shows adversarial example transfer depends heavily on source-target compatibility, with source averaging understating vulnerability.

The study evaluates adversarial example transferability across 60 deepfake detectors spanning six backbones, two pretraining regimes, and five training-data configurations, using AutoAttack (AA) and Carlini-Wagner with Expectation over Transformation (CW-EOT). Transfer rises sharply when source and target share an exact backbone, architecture family, pretraining regime, or training data, with the dominant factor depending on the attack. Mean attack success rate is 7.21% under AA and 19.52% under CW-EOT for single sources, while a multi-source oracle reaches 64.48% after excluding exact matches, showing source averaging can substantially understate target vulnerability. The authors release 240,000 adversarially perturbed images, pairwise transfer results, detector configurations, and evaluation code.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoAI safety & security

Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains

TrED formalizes transfer learning for domains whose data availability evolves over time, arguing classical settings are regimes along one trajectory, and remains unsolved.

The paper introduces Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains (TrED), formalizing transfer learning as a trajectory problem where target data and labels are progressively collected. TrED is specified by a data availability process fixed by the environment, a freely chosen learning protocol, and an evaluation criterion scoring the whole trajectory of models. Classical settings like domain generalization, domain adaptation, and multi-domain learning are recovered as regimes within this framework. The authors survey the literature and find most methods are tailored to a single regime, leaving TrED a well-posed open problem.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 4d agoAI research

Switching Password Managers in 2026

An Apple password-management engineer (writing personally) explains switching password managers via iOS direct app-to-app export, crediting FIDO Credential Exchange for passkey portability.

Ricky Mondello, an Apple engineer in password management and authentication (writing personally, not for Apple), demonstrates moving 100 items from 1Password to Apple Passwords via the iOS system export, which transfers passwords, passkeys, verification codes, and notes directly between apps with Face ID confirmation and no intermediate files. He credits the FIDO Alliance's Credential Exchange format (first draft May 2024, now an open spec) and iOS 26/macOS 26 for enabling phishing-resistant credential transfer between apps like 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, DuckDuckGo, and Devolutions. The post is advice rather than news, recommending bulk transfer on the existing device, switching AutoFill to the new app, and treating the new manager as the source of truth.

Lobsters · security · 7d agoIndustry1

Unified CT and MRI Pancreas Segmentation for Label-Efficient Cross-Modality Subregion Transfer

Domain-adversarial nnU-Net trained on 4,604 CT/MRI scans achieves 87.31% Dice pancreas segmentation with label-efficient subregion transfer.

A unified 3D pancreas segmentation framework applies domain-adversarial learning to 4,604 heterogeneous CT and MRI scans, aligning CT-MRI features via a latent domain discriminator on a shared nnU-Net encoder-decoder. Whole-pancreas segmentation reaches 87.31% Dice in-distribution and 84.20%-88.09% across external OOD datasets. The transferred encoder achieves 80.53% Dice on MRI and 83.05% on CT for downstream head-body-tail subregion segmentation using only limited MRI subregion annotations.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 4d agoAI research

CosmoH2G: A Hand-to-Gripper Transfer Dataset and Baseline Method for Object Manipulation with Complex Spatial Movements

Researchers release CosmoH2G, a 6,189-episode hand-to-gripper dataset with a two-stage method for complex spatial robot manipulation.

The paper introduces a scalable acquisition pipeline using a handheld gripper to collect paired hand-gripper demonstrations, producing 6,189 episodes across 1,254 unique objects with higher spatial complexity than existing benchmarks. A two-stage framework first predicts sparse gripper keyframes (initial and terminal), then generates the full continuous action sequence conditioned on them, while learning gripper orientation and post-optimizing translation via grasping heuristics and kinematic consistency. Simulation and real-robot experiments show stable, precise hand-to-gripper transfer of complex spatial manipulations, outperforming traditional baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

2026 Cyber Insurance Trends Report: What's Changed and What You Need to Know

Huntress survey: CIRCIA reporting mandates now live, BEC claims exceed ransomware, exfiltration-heavy attacks cost twice as much, premiums rising.

Huntress's 2026 cyber insurance trends report, based on its own survey, finds 79% of respondents carry cyber insurance while 58% report shrinking coverage over five years. New CIRCIA federal reporting mandates and EU NIS2 requirements are reshaping policies, business email compromise now drives more claims than ransomware, and data exfiltration has replaced encryption as the dominant ransomware tactic at roughly twice the cost. After three years of declining premiums, rates are climbing again, and most businesses now refuse to pay ransoms.

Huntress · 14d agoIndustry1

11 Best Device Control & USB Security Tools Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

2026 comparison of 11 device control and USB security tools ranks CoSoSys Endpoint Protector first for cross-platform control and DLP.

An editorial scorecard evaluates eleven device control and removable-media security tools across granularity, content-aware DLP, cross-platform parity, encryption/shadowing, and value. CoSoSys Endpoint Protector (now part of Netwrix) leads at 4.60 for genuine Windows, macOS, and Linux parity, with Ivanti DeviceLock at 4.25 for the deepest Windows peripheral control and Safetica positioned for SMB and mid-market value. Enterprise content-aware DLP anchors include Symantec (Broadcom), Forcepoint, Digital Guardian (Fortra), and Trellix, with pricing almost always per endpoint.

GBHackersupdated · 3h agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 13 sources

StudyBench: Can Self-Evolution Squeeze Textbooks for Olympiad Capability?

Researchers introduce StudyBench, a physics benchmark showing self-evolution gains on textbook problems rarely transfer to olympiad-level questions.

StudyBench is a controlled physics benchmark splitting test data into an Application Set of difficult textbook problems and a Transfer Set of olympiad-level problems. Across three base models, representative self-evolution methods improved on the Application Set but rarely transferred to the harder Transfer Set. A guidance ablation reveals a Guidance Gap, and every method hits a Compute Plateau, indicating the remaining limits are method problems rather than data or compute problems.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

Building the materials foundation for AInew

Syensqo's CTO says AI pushes semiconductors and data centers to physical limits, driving advanced materials demand and AI-accelerated materials discovery.

MIT Technology Review's Business Lab podcast, produced in partnership with Syensqo, features CTO Mike Finelli discussing how AI workloads push semiconductors and data centers to physical limits in performance, thermal management, and reliability. Syensqo develops high-voltage data center materials, semiconductor sealing materials, and immersion cooling fluids, while using AI agents to digitally synthesize millions of molecular combinations and predict performance before lab testing. Finelli describes a reinforcing cycle where AI improves materials that in turn enable better AI infrastructure.

AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era

Survey organizes foundation-model AI for games into six roles and analyzes which capabilities transfer across playing, design, building, runtime adaptation, and testing.

A survey maps foundation-model and learned world-model research across the game lifecycle into six roles: playing/acting, modeling players and games, designing games, building/maintaining games, runtime generation/adaptation, and testing/evaluation. The authors identify cross-role connections such as trajectories training world models and design specifications driving executable implementations. Control schemes, rules, engine interfaces, state representations, and player contexts often remain setting-specific, so downstream claims require validation in the target setting. Evaluation is most standardized for bounded game playing, while persistent state, repeated revision, validated player modeling, and automated testing remain less established.

Hugging Face daily papers · 1d agoAI research

Your passkeys can now move between password managers on Android

Google enabled direct password and passkey transfers between Android password managers, initiated from the destination app without unencrypted file exports.

Android now supports moving passwords and passkeys directly between password managers without exporting them to a file, replacing the previous unencrypted-export workflow. The transfer is initiated in the receiving app, which hands off to Android to detect installed managers and request authorization in the source app. The feature works today with Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with more partners promised but unnamed. Google says data moves between apps in seconds and calls the handoff secure, without detailing the protections.

Help Net Security · 5d agoTools

Do Input-Level Defenses Transfer to Observation-Level Attacks on VideoLLMs?

A systematic study shows input-level adversarial defenses provide inconsistent, often near-zero protection against observation-level attacks on video LLMs.

Researchers introduce DefTEval, a controlled framework testing eleven input-level defenses against five attack types across five video LLMs. Harmful-content detection rates are frequently near zero, and defenses fail even when attacks embed harmful signals in every sampled frame. Token compression discards localized safety features and modality fusion down-weights weakened visual signals, with defense outcomes dominated by model architecture rather than the defense method.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security

Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

Researchers added Greek to the Cosmos3 vision-language-action policy using only machine-rephrased instructions, finding bilingual training reaches roughly two fifths of English performance.

The paper studies localizing the open Cosmos3 vision-language-action robot policy to Greek without architectural changes, using machine-rephrased instructions only. Bilingual training yields a consistent 6.7-7.1 point margin over controls on a 90-task, three-seed evaluation suite, while Greek-only training gains at most 2.7 points. Several common evaluation instruments, including color-histogram metrics and single-goal benchmarks, produced false conclusions, and results were dominated by seed variation. The authors recommend building guaranteed-null baselines and replicating low-resource-language results across seeds.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

[AINews] Jev: a “System One Model” that only decides/classifies/routes/scores — >100x faster, >200x cheaper than small frontier LLMs

TypeSafe launches Jev, an RLCD-trained decision model claiming 20-200x faster, 40-400x cheaper classification than frontier LLMs, alongside Gemini 3.8 Live and Neon.

TypeSafe's Jev is a 'System One' decision model trained with RLCD, claiming 20-200x faster and 40-400x cheaper classification and routing than frontier LLMs with free output tokens and no hallucinated text. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, supporting 97 languages and async tool calls, debuting #1 on Artificial Analysis' speech-to-speech index at 82.6. Periodic Labs' Neon is a ~1T-parameter XRD analysis model trained with RL on proprietary lab data using 1,300 H200s, lifting FrontierXRD success from 2.7% to 55.3% and beating GPT-6 Astra at lower inference cost.

Latent Space · 2h agoModel release

Learning to Coach for Experiential Learning

Learning to Coach trains a dedicated LLM coach to extract transferable experiential knowledge from a frozen actor's trajectories, beating self-refinement.

Learning to Coach (L2C) trains an LLM-as-a-Coach to extract actionable experiential knowledge from a frozen actor model's previous solution trajectories, optimizing rewards based on the actor's guided response correctness. It studies same-instance and cross-instance rewards, where cross-instance elicits knowledge that transfers to other problems. Across mathematical reasoning and interactive text-games, L2C outperforms self-refinement and untrained coaches, scales better with extra inference iterations than larger decoding budgets, and transfers to out-of-distribution tasks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research1

JarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task Composition

JarvisGUI benchmark tests GUI agents on cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu, revealing major gaps in state transfer and long-horizon reasoning.

JarvisGUI is a dynamic benchmark that formulates GUI tasks as input-output transformations under a lightweight type system, automatically composing multi-step cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu virtual environments. Evaluation shows state-of-the-art open-source GUI agents struggle with state-transfer awareness, cross-platform contextual reasoning, and long-horizon dependency management, exposing a capability gap invisible to existing single-device benchmarks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

AI Agents Are Here. So Are the Threats.

Unit 42 demonstrates nine framework-agnostic attack scenarios against AI agents built with CrewAI and AutoGen, causing data leakage, credential theft and remote code execution.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated how attackers can target agentic applications, implementing two functionally identical apps with the open-source CrewAI and AutoGen frameworks and executing the same attacks on both. Nine attack scenarios produce outcomes including information leakage, credential theft, tool exploitation and remote code execution. Findings show most vulnerabilities are framework-agnostic, arising from insecure design patterns, misconfigurations and unsafe tool integrations rather than flaws in the frameworks themselves. The team published defense strategies per scenario and open-sourced the source code and datasets on GitHub.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?

Amazon researchers explain why ML research agents avoid benchmark overfitting, attributing generalization to compressibility of successful strategies.

Amazon Science summarizes the paper "What fits (into few tokens) doesn't overfit: Compression and generalization in ML research agents," which investigates why benchmark hill-climbing loops, whether run by human communities or LLM research agents, do not produce rampant overfitting. The explanation formalizes Occam's razor via a counting argument: successful ML strategies are highly compressible, so short descriptions lack room to memorize benchmark data and must capture real structure. LLM-based agents, being resettable and controllable, allow this hypothesis to be tested empirically.

Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit’s looming data sale to Google

Startups object to Google's bankruptcy-auction purchase of Spirit Airlines operational data, claiming proprietary IP is being sold without consent.

Google won an auction to acquire a large enterprise dataset from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, which it says will help improve its products and AI models, with no personal information included. Springshot, whose airline logistics platform powered Spirit's stack, filed a limited objection arguing the vaguely defined data categories could transfer third-party IP and trade secrets it owns; International Aero Engines filed a similar objection. The EFF called it the first public bankruptcy proceeding over selling company and employee data as an asset, and objectors warn of a precedent letting large companies acquire startup IP through bankruptcy courts.

Ars Technica · AI · 5d agoAI industry

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Hacker News ThreatsDay digest: malicious browser extensions, AI-agent intrusions, NCSC shadow AI warning, M&A wire fraud, and 119,000-domain fake shops.

Socket found four malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions (J7Tracker, VREO, Orbit Tracker) stealing session tokens and wallet data from Axiom Trade and Padre users via attacker-controlled Vercel deployments. Hunt.io reported a Chinese-speaking operator using Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek with the SecFlow orchestration framework to automate intrusions against government and financial targets in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the US. The UK NCSC warned shadow AI use risks breaches and regulatory failure, Microsoft announced privacy-preserving Windows Age APIs, and Gen Digital described fake M&A wire-fraud scams. A 119,000-domain fake-shop operation called DoppelCart was also highlighted.

The Hacker News · 5d agoIndustry in the wild

World in World: Explore the World with World Models

World in World is a training-free inference-time interface enabling camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and motion transfer with frozen causal video world models.

The framework converts heterogeneous control evidence into camera- and time-labelled clean visual states that are read through the native self-attention of a frozen causal video model. Evidence includes source-video observations, target-view scene projections, geometry renderings for completing newly exposed regions, and retrieved generated states beyond the rolling cache. A correspondence router combines persistent point identities with geometry for token correspondences, while evidence-wise attention CFG independently regulates each auxiliary channel. The shared interface supports camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and human-motion transfer without additional training.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Learning with Covariance Matrices: Principal Component Analysis Meets Learning with Graphs

Theoretical tutorial establishes equivalence between covariance neural networks and PCA, with stability and transferability bounds and brain-age applications.

The paper reviews the theory of coVariance neural networks (VNNs), graph neural networks that operate on covariance matrices as graphs. It derives a conceptual equivalence between VNNs and PCA-based information processing, refined stability bounds under finite-sample covariance perturbations, and transferability characterizations across multiscale datasets. Demonstrated applications include brain age gap estimation for neurodegenerative conditions from neuroimaging data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

Supply Chain Attacks in 2026: Why Threat Intelligence Is the Only Early Warning System That Works

Cyble argues supply chain attacks are a primary breach vector, citing Verizon DBIR third-party figures and CISA SBOM guidance to pitch its TPRM platform.

Cyble's vendor blog frames third-party compromise as a first-order breach risk, citing Verizon's 2026 DBIR finding that third parties were involved in 48% of breaches, up 60% year over year. It recounts the Cl0p campaigns against Progress MOVEit Transfer (CVE-2023-34362), which affected over 2,700 organizations and 93 million people, and Fortra GoAnywhere (CVE-2023-0669) with roughly 130 claimed victims. It also highlights CISA and NSA's 2026 Minimum Elements for a Software Bill of Materials covering open-source, AI, and SaaS components. The piece concludes by promoting Cyble's Third-Party Risk Management platform.

Cyble · 13d agoIndustryCVE-2023-34362CVE-2023-0669

Cybersecurity IR Workshop: The workshop you shouldn’t miss

Microsoft's DART team promotes a 2-3 day Cybersecurity Incident Response Readiness Workshop that stress-tests IR plans against simulated attacks.

Microsoft's Detection and Response Team (DART), which delivers Defender Experts incident response and has supported organizations across 54 countries, is offering its Cybersecurity Incident Response Readiness Workshop. The scenario-driven engagement exercises detection, investigation, containment, and decision-making across identity, endpoint, cloud, and communications, ending with prioritized recommendations. It is available to Unified Enterprise agreement customers via their Customer Success Account Manager.

Microsoft Security Blog · 14d agoIndustry

You don’t have to join the hack-back program to inherit its risk

A new US presidential memorandum creates a vetted private hack-back program, leaving participating vendors and their customers with untested legal liability and collateral risks.

The August 12 National Security Presidential Memorandum directs the National Coordination Center, run jointly by DOJ and DHS, to approve covert surveillance and disruptive Cyber Effects Operations by vetted private companies, with a forfeitable bond of at least $1 million required as a contract condition. The analysis argues the criminal shield rests on an untested reading of the CFAA exemption at 18 U.S.C. 1030(f), with no civil safe harbor, no state-law preemption and no foreign-law protection. Non-participating organizations can still inherit risk through shared infrastructure collateral damage, lack of customer disclosure, Lloyd's bulletin Y5381 state-backed attack exclusions, and threat-intelligence pipelines feeding offensive proposals.

CSO Online · 4h agoPolicy & legal

Coupled Calibration and Learning: Mitigating Teacher Bias in LLM Distillation without Target-Domain Reward Feedback

CCL couples teacher calibration with student updates via token-level branching, provably removing teacher bias in LLM distillation.

The paper proposes Coupled Calibration and Learning (CCL), an LLM distillation algorithm that alternates teacher calibration using source-question reward feedback with student training on target questions under covariate shift. Each iteration calibrates the teacher on source feedback, trains the student on target questions, and lets the updated student inform subsequent calibration. The authors prove the student's expected KL divergence to the oracle student converges to zero at a polynomial rate, and show regularized direct matching error can remain bounded away from zero.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 20h agoAI research

AI for everyone in every language

Google says its AI now spans 300+ languages reaching 7 billion people, unveiling Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, Live Translate, and TranslateGemma models.

Google announced its technologies now support more than 300 languages spoken by 7 billion people, 86% of the global population. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate powers real-time spoken translation across 70 languages and 2,000+ language pairs, while Gemini 3.5 Transcribe is its most precise speech-to-text model. Its Universal Speech Model was trained on 12 million hours of audio using cross-lingual transfer learning, and TranslateGemma is a family of lightweight open translation models covering 55 languages that run on-device. Open-data partnerships include WAXAL covering 27 Sub-Saharan African languages and Project Vaani with 30,000+ hours of speech across 109 languages.

Google · AI · 21h agoAI industry

Weekly Cybersecurity Newsletter – Top 50 Biggest Cybersecurity Stories of the Week

GBHackers weekly digest rounds up 50 stories including Microsoft's 973-CVE patch drop, exploited Cisco FMC flaws, and Claude agent attacks.

GBHackers' September 7-12, 2026 newsletter summarizes the 50 biggest cybersecurity stories of the week. Highlights include Microsoft patching a record 973 CVEs with two exploited zero-days, active exploitation of Cisco FMC, Check Point VPN and Ivanti flaws, China-linked crews chaining Chrome and Windows zero-days, AI agents mass-exploiting PaperCut to compromise 440 servers, and the emergence of Panzer cross-platform ransomware. It also covers Anthropic and OpenAI agentic AI incidents and CrowdStrike's SafeMind launch.

GBHackers · 1d agoIndustry in the wild

Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 2d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read