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20 curated stories#Research News.
Curated coverage, model releases, technical papers, and engineering updates tagged with #Research.
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Showing 20 stories tagged #Research
The Pentagon wants $30 million to build an AI-powered lie detector
The US government wants to spend $30.3 million over the next five years on an improved form of lie detector, according to a Department of Defense budget request. The program, called “Polygraph+” or “Polygraph Next”, will focus on scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence and machine learning and on a techniqu...
Introducing Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar
Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar brings near real-time visual presence to Gemini’s conversational AI.
How Open Science Can Help Researchers Prepare for the Next Pandemic
When COVID-19 emerged, scientists had a crucial advantage: Decades of prior research on coronaviruses meant they understood the virus’ key proteins well enough to design vaccines in record time. The next pandemic may not offer the same head start. To help improve the odds, NVIDIA has joined a coalition of global resea...
Compressing Streaming Neural Audio Encoders via Latent-Space Distillation
System-wide Dictation on Apple devices runs entirely on-device, and the speech it transcribes reaches the foundation model through a tokenizer: an encoder that maps short windows of waveform onto the representation the language model reads. Because that model is sparsely activated under Instruction-Following Pruning, o...
A Practical Recipe for Semi-Supervised Federated ASR: Online Pseudo-Labels with Server Update Stabilization
Semi-supervised federated learning (SSFL) trains models on clients’ unlabeled data using a teacher to generate pseudo-labels, with a small labeled seed dataset on the server. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is particularly fragile here: pseudo-label errors compound across the output sequence and across training roun...
Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics
Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads. The post Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics appeared ...
Advancing Private AI Compute with secure, server-side memory
Introducing private, server-side memory to Private AI Compute for personal AI.
Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello
Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS are our most expressive audio models yet.
The AI Hype Index: AI loves cheating
Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems...
How to Guide Your Language Flow
We introduce a new method to guide flow matching models. Our approach, which we call probe guidance, uses the frozen internal states of an existing diffusion model to construct a guidance signal. This works using a similar principle as autoguidance, but eliminates the need for an additional forward pass at inference ti...
Roundtables: The Deadly Failures of The Virtual Border Wall
The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who moved through a...
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents ...
Improving synthesis prediction of small molecules at scale with RetroChimera
Custom-made molecules are advancing medicine, materials, and agriculture, but producing them is slow and expensive. A new Nature paper highlights RetroChimera, a predictive model that helps accelerate chemical synthesis, helping researchers explore a wide range of molecules. The post Improving synthesis prediction of s...
She died at the San Diego border. A surveillance camera was in plain sight
She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost. It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gómez Hernández crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California, sending voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked. This story is part of Dy...
4 ways to address the failures we found along the US border’s “virtual wall”
MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nea...
The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?
When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. New...
How we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border’s “virtual wall”
Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Die...
Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered.
On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event for subscribers that asked the question everyone’s asking right now: Could AI really kill us all? But attendees had so many more questions than we had time to answer in the 30 minute session. So we asked our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and…
Dynamically Scaled Activation Steering
Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation. However, most existing methods apply interventions uniformly across all inputs, degrading model performance when steering is unnecessary. We introduce Dynamically Scal...
REVERSAL-BENCH: A Reversibility Axis and Reset Oracle for Measuring the Reset-Free RL Cliff
A central goal of autonomous reinforcement learning is continuous policy training without external resets. However, existing paradigms largely depend on underlying environmental reversibility, a property absent in real world manipulation, where events such as pushing objects off tables or spilling granular substances c...