Daily Papers

Scene text detection methods based on neural networks have emerged recently and have shown promising results. Previous methods trained with rigid word-level bounding boxes exhibit limitations in representing the text region in an arbitrary shape. In this paper, we propose a new scene text detection method to effectively detect text area by exploring each character and affinity between characters. To overcome the lack of individual character level annotations, our proposed framework exploits both the given character-level annotations for synthetic images and the estimated character-level ground-truths for real images acquired by the learned interim model. In order to estimate affinity between characters, the network is trained with the newly proposed representation for affinity. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks, including the TotalText and CTW-1500 datasets which contain highly curved texts in natural images, demonstrate that our character-level text detection significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors. According to the results, our proposed method guarantees high flexibility in detecting complicated scene text images, such as arbitrarily-oriented, curved, or deformed texts.

This report presents a comprehensive response to the United Nation's Interim Report on Governing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Humanity. It emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while acknowledging the need for robust governance to mitigate associated risks. The response highlights opportunities for promoting equitable, secure, and inclusive AI ecosystems, which should be supported by investments in infrastructure and multi-stakeholder collaborations across jurisdictions. It also underscores challenges, including societal inequalities exacerbated by AI, ethical concerns, and environmental impacts. Recommendations advocate for legally binding norms, transparency, and multi-layered data governance models, alongside fostering AI literacy and capacity-building initiatives. Internationally, the report calls for harmonising AI governance frameworks with established laws, human rights standards, and regulatory approaches. The report concludes with actionable principles for fostering responsible AI governance through collaboration among governments, industry, academia, and civil society, ensuring the development of AI aligns with universal human values and the public good.

Accuracy and timeliness are indeed often conflicting goals in prediction tasks. Premature predictions may yield a higher rate of false alarms, whereas delaying predictions to gather more information can render them too late to be useful. In applications such as wildfires, crimes, and traffic jams, timely forecasting are vital for safeguarding human life and property. Consequently, finding a balance between accuracy and timeliness is crucial. In this paper, we propose an early spatio-temporal forecasting model based on Multi-Objective reinforcement learning that can either implement an optimal policy given a preference or infer the preference based on a small number of samples. The model addresses two primary challenges: 1) enhancing the accuracy of early forecasting and 2) providing the optimal policy for determining the most suitable prediction time for each area. Our method demonstrates superior performance on three large-scale real-world datasets, surpassing existing methods in early spatio-temporal forecasting tasks.

In light of recent work on scheduling with predicted job sizes, we consider the effect of the cost of predictions in queueing systems, removing the assumption in prior research that predictions are external to the system's resources and/or cost-free. In particular, we introduce a novel approach to utilizing predictions, SkipPredict, designed to address their inherent cost. Rather than uniformly applying predictions to all jobs, we propose a tailored approach that categorizes jobs based on their prediction requirements. To achieve this, we employ one-bit "cheap predictions" to classify jobs as either short or long. SkipPredict prioritizes predicted short jobs over long jobs, and for the latter, SkipPredict applies a second round of more detailed "expensive predictions" to approximate Shortest Remaining Processing Time for these jobs. Our analysis takes into account the cost of prediction. We examine the effect of this cost for two distinct models. In the external cost model, predictions are generated by some external method without impacting job service times but incur a cost. In the server time cost model, predictions themselves require server processing time, and are scheduled on the same server as the jobs.

Early warning signals have been proposed to forecast the possibility of a critical transition, such as the eutrophication of a lake, the collapse of a coral reef, or the end of a glacial period. Because such transitions often unfold on temporal and spatial scales that can be difficult to approach by experimental manipulation, research has often relied on historical observations as a source of natural experiments. Here we examine a critical difference between selecting systems for study based on the fact that we have observed a critical transition and those systems for which we wish to forecast the approach of a transition. This difference arises by conditionally selecting systems known to experience a transition of some sort and failing to account for the bias this introduces -- a statistical error often known as the Prosecutor's Fallacy. By analysing simulated systems that have experienced transitions purely by chance, we reveal an elevated rate of false positives in common warning signal statistics. We further demonstrate a model-based approach that is less subject to this bias than these more commonly used summary statistics. We note that experimental studies with replicates avoid this pitfall entirely.

In quantitative finance, machine learning methods are essential for alpha generation. This study introduces a new approach that combines Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and neural networks, integrated with Black-Litterman portfolio optimization. During the COVID period (2019-2022), this dual-model approach achieved a 83% return with a Sharpe ratio of 0.77. It incorporates two risk models to enhance risk management, showing efficiency during volatile periods. The methodology was implemented on the QuantConnect platform, which was chosen for its robust framework and experimental reproducibility. The system, which predicts future price movements, includes a three-year warm-up to ensure proper algorithm function. It targets highly liquid, large-cap energy stocks to ensure stable and predictable performance while also considering broker payments. The dual-model alpha system utilizes log returns to select the optimal state based on the historical performance. It combines state predictions with neural network outputs, which are based on historical data, to generate trading signals. This study examined the architecture of the trading system, data pre-processing, training, and performance. The full code and backtesting data are available under the QuantConnect terms.

Intermittent demand forecasting poses unique challenges due to sparse observations, cold-start items, and obsolescence. Classical models such as Croston, SBA, and the Teunter-Syntetos-Babai (TSB) method provide simple heuristics but lack a principled generative foundation. Deep learning models address these limitations but often require large datasets and sacrifice interpretability. We introduce TSB-HB, a hierarchical Bayesian extension of TSB. Demand occurrence is modeled with a Beta-Binomial distribution, while nonzero demand sizes follow a Log-Normal distribution. Crucially, hierarchical priors enable partial pooling across items, stabilizing estimates for sparse or cold-start series while preserving heterogeneity. This framework yields a fully generative and interpretable model that generalizes classical exponential smoothing. On the UCI Online Retail dataset, TSB-HB achieves lower RMSE and RMSSE than Croston, SBA, TSB, ADIDA, IMAPA, ARIMA and Theta, and on a subset of the M5 dataset it outperforms all classical baselines we evaluate. The model provides calibrated probabilistic forecasts and improved accuracy on intermittent and lumpy items by combining a generative formulation with hierarchical shrinkage, while remaining interpretable and scalable.

Epidemic forecasting has become an integral part of real-time infectious disease outbreak response. While collaborative ensembles composed of statistical and machine learning models have become the norm for real-time forecasting, standardized benchmark datasets for evaluating such methods are lacking. Further, there is limited understanding on performance of these methods for novel outbreaks with limited historical data. In this paper, we propose IDOBE, a curated collection of epidemiological time series focused on outbreak forecasting. IDOBE compiles from multiple data repositories spanning over a century of surveillance and across U.S. states and global locations. We perform derivative-based segmentation to generate over 10,000 outbreaks covering multiple outcomes such as cases and hospitalizations for 13 diseases. We consider a variety of information-theoretic and distributional measures to quantify the epidemiological diversity of the dataset. Finally, we perform multi-horizon short-term forecasting (1- to 4-week-ahead) through the progression of the outbreak using 11 baseline models and report on their performance. In addition to standard metrics such as NMSE and MAPE for point forecasts, we include probabilistic scoring rules such as Normalized Weighted Interval Score (NWIS) to quantify the performance. We find that MLP-based methods have the most robust performance, with statistical methods having a slight edge during the pre-peak phase. IDOBE dataset along with baselines are released publicly on https://github.com/NSSAC/IDOBE to enable standardized, reproducible benchmarking of outbreak forecasting methods.

We present FastNet version 1.0, a data-driven medium range numerical weather prediction (NWP) model based on a Graph Neural Network architecture, developed jointly between the Alan Turing Institute and the Met Office. FastNet uses an encode-process-decode structure to produce deterministic global weather predictions out to 10 days. The architecture is independent of spatial resolution and we have trained models at 1^{circ} and 0.25^{circ} resolution, with a six hour time step. FastNet uses a multi-level mesh in the processor, which is able to capture both short-range and long-range patterns in the spatial structure of the atmosphere. The model is pre-trained on ECMWF's ERA5 reanalysis data and then fine-tuned on additional autoregressive rollout steps, which improves accuracy over longer time horizons. We evaluate the model performance at 1.5^{circ} resolution using 2022 as a hold-out year and compare with the Met Office Global Model, finding that FastNet surpasses the skill of the current Met Office Global Model NWP system using a variety of evaluation metrics on a number of atmospheric variables. Our results show that both our 1^{circ} and 0.25^{circ} FastNet models outperform the current Global Model and produce results with predictive skill approaching those of other data-driven models trained on 0.25^{circ} ERA5.

The vast majority of time-series forecasting approaches require a substantial training dataset. However, many real-life forecasting applications have very little initial observations, sometimes just 40 or fewer. Thus, the applicability of most forecasting methods is restricted in data-sparse commercial applications. While there is recent work in the setting of very limited initial data (so-called `zero-shot' forecasting), its performance is inconsistent depending on the data used for pretraining. In this work, we take a different approach and devise ForecastPFN, the first zero-shot forecasting model trained purely on a novel synthetic data distribution. ForecastPFN is a prior-data fitted network, trained to approximate Bayesian inference, which can make predictions on a new time series dataset in a single forward pass. Through extensive experiments, we show that zero-shot predictions made by ForecastPFN are more accurate and faster compared to state-of-the-art forecasting methods, even when the other methods are allowed to train on hundreds of additional in-distribution data points.

Accurate epidemic forecasting is crucial for outbreak preparedness, but existing data-driven models are often brittle. Typically trained on a single pathogen, they struggle with data scarcity during new outbreaks and fail under distribution shifts caused by viral evolution or interventions. However, decades of surveillance data and the design of various compartmental models from diverse diseases offer an untapped source of transferable knowledge. To leverage the collective lessons from history, we propose CAPE, the first open-source pre-trained model for epidemic forecasting. Unlike existing time series foundation models that overlook epidemiological challenges, CAPE models epidemic dynamics as mixtures of latent compartmental population states, termed compartmental prototypes. It models a flexible dictionary of compartment prototypes directly from a large collection of simulation data, enabling each outbreak to be expressed as a time-varying mixture that links observed infections to latent population states. To promote robust generalization, CAPE adopts the next-token-prediction paradigm during pre-training with lightweight epidemic-aware regularization that aligns the learned prototypes with epidemiological semantics. On a comprehensive benchmark spanning 17 diseases, CAPE significantly outperforms strong baselines with zero-shot forecasting. This work represents a principled step toward pre-trained epidemic models that are both transferable and epidemiologically grounded. We provide our code in: https://github.com/nuuuh/CAPE.

Armed conflict has led to an unprecedented number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) - individuals who are forced out of their homes but remain within their country. IDPs often urgently require shelter, food, and healthcare, yet prediction of when large fluxes of IDPs will cross into an area remains a major challenge for aid delivery organizations. Accurate forecasting of IDP migration would empower humanitarian aid groups to more effectively allocate resources during conflicts. We show that monthly flow of IDPs from province to province in both Syria and Yemen can be accurately forecasted one month in advance, using publicly available data. We model monthly IDP flow using data on food price, fuel price, wage, geospatial, and news data. We find that machine learning approaches can more accurately forecast migration trends than baseline persistence models. Our findings thus potentially enable proactive aid allocation for IDPs in anticipation of forecasted arrivals.

We introduce MACROCAST, a lightweight Time Series Foundation Model (TSFM) for real-time macroeconomic forecasting. Existing TSFMs suffer from data leakage in two forms: temporal contamination, as the model may have seen the realized values of the series it forecasts, and revision bias, as training on fully revised data diverges from the preliminary, vintage-specific releases available to real-time forecasters. MACROCAST is, to our knowledge, the first TSFM that rules out both forms of leakage entirely: at no stage of training is the model exposed to information that would not have been available to a forecaster in real time. We train MACROCAST first on purely synthetic time series in approximately one GPU-day and then fine-tune it on synthetic time series drawn from Bayesian VARs, dynamic factor models, and ARIMA specifications estimated on vintage-specific ALFRED data. Because pretraining uses only simulated data and fine-tuning uses only real-time vintages, no observed future or revised value ever enters the model; each fine-tuning run takes nine minutes. Evaluated on the FRED-MD database in a genuine real-time out-of-sample exercise, MACROCAST improves on the AR(1) benchmark for roughly 80% of series-horizon pairs, matches or surpasses Chronos-2 -- the strongest currently available TSFM -- and outperforms the Bayesian VAR and dynamic factor model benchmarks, all in a data-leakage-free manner.

Encouraged by decision makers' appetite for future information on topics ranging from elections to pandemics, and enabled by the explosion of data and computational methods, model based forecasts have garnered increasing influence on a breadth of decisions in modern society. Using several classic examples from fisheries management, I demonstrate that selecting the model or models that produce the most accurate and precise forecast (measured by statistical scores) can sometimes lead to worse outcomes (measured by real-world objectives). This can create a forecast trap, in which the outcomes such as fish biomass or economic yield decline while the manager becomes increasingly convinced that these actions are consistent with the best models and data available. The forecast trap is not unique to this example, but a fundamental consequence of non-uniqueness of models. Existing practices promoting a broader set of models are the best way to avoid the trap.

Time series forecasting models are increasingly scaled through large Transformer backbones, yet most existing approaches process all series through a shared dense computation path despite substantial heterogeneity in temporal structure. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers a natural alternative by enabling conditional computation, but standard MoE routing leaves expert specialization weakly identified and often unstable during downstream adaptation. We propose AME-TS, a structure-guided sparse time series foundation model that aligns expert routing with interpretable temporal structure. AME-TS first uses a lightweight regime predictor to estimate series-level descriptors, including forecastability, seasonality, trend, and sparsity, and maps them to a soft structural prior over experts. This series-level prior guides token-level routing during training, encouraging structure-aligned specialization. On the GIFT-Eval benchmark, AME-TS delivers a strong accuracy-efficiency tradeoff across model scales: it substantially outperforms existing time series foundation models at small model scales and remains competitive with the strongest models at larger scales, while activating substantially fewer parameters through sparse routing. We further show that AME-TS learns more interpretable routing geometry and substantially more stable expert specialization than standard MoE during fine-tuning on the M5 dataset. These results suggest that structure-aware routing is an effective and reliable way to realize the benefits of sparse expert models for time series forecasting.

High-stakes decision making involves reasoning under uncertainty about the future. In this work, we train language models to make predictions on open-ended forecasting questions. To scale up training data, we synthesize novel forecasting questions from global events reported in daily news, using a fully automated, careful curation recipe. We train the Qwen3 thinking models on our dataset, OpenForesight. To prevent leakage of future information during training and evaluation, we use an offline news corpus, both for data generation and retrieval in our forecasting system. Guided by a small validation set, we show the benefits of retrieval, and an improved reward function for reinforcement learning (RL). Once we obtain our final forecasting system, we perform held-out testing between May to August 2025. Our specialized model, OpenForecaster 8B, matches much larger proprietary models, with our training improving the accuracy, calibration, and consistency of predictions. We find calibration improvements from forecasting training generalize across popular benchmarks. We open-source all our models, code, and data to make research on language model forecasting broadly accessible.