# Jun 3, 2025ML Times

- **Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android**  
  **Meta and Yandex have developed a covert tracking method on Android that allows their apps to listen on local ports, enabling them to link web browsing data to user identities without consent.** This method exploits the Android OS's permission model, allowing JavaScript from websites to communicate with native apps via localhost sockets, effectively bypassing privacy protections.

- **Vision Language Models Are Biased**  
  **Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieve 100% accuracy on familiar images but plummet to ~17% on modified versions**, revealing a reliance on memorized knowledge rather than genuine visual analysis, which is a critical flaw in their design.

- **Vision Language Models are Biased**  
  **Vision Language Models (VLMs) exhibit significant biases**, scoring an average of **17.05% accuracy** in counting tasks, revealing their inability to adapt to simple changes in visual stimuli, such as recognizing alterations in logos.

- **[D] Is overfitting still relevant in the era double descent?**  
  **Double descent** suggests that increasing model capacity can lower testing error, challenging traditional views on **overfitting** and model complexity in machine learning.

- **[R] Soft Thinking: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of LLMs in Continuous Concept Space**  
  **Soft Thinking** introduces a novel method that enables **human-like reasoning** in LLMs by utilizing **continuous concept space**, allowing for smoother transitions and richer representations beyond discrete token limitations.

- **Yoshua Bengio Launches LawZero: A New Nonprofit Advancing Safe-by-Design AI**  
  **Yoshua Bengio** has launched **LawZero**, a nonprofit focused on developing **safe-by-design AI systems** to mitigate risks associated with current AI technologies, such as **deception** and **goal misalignment**.

- **Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored**  
  **Deep learning models, despite their glamour, can produce significant errors; a recent study revealed that a Transformer model made hundreds of incorrect predictions about enzyme functions, undermining its credibility.**

- **[R] System Prompt Learning: A Third Paradigm for LLM Learning Beyond Pretraining and Fine-tuning**  
  **System Prompt Learning (SPL)** introduces a **novel paradigm** for LLMs, enabling them to learn explicit problem-solving strategies from experience, resulting in a **4% to 8.6% improvement** on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks like Arena Hard and AIME24.

- **Advanced audio dialog and generation with Gemini 2.5**  
  **Gemini 2.5 introduces advanced AI-powered audio dialog and generation**, enabling real-time, natural conversations with features like tone control, multilingual support, and context awareness, enhancing user interaction significantly.

- **🤗SmolVLA: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model trained on Lerobot Community Data**  
  **SmolVLA** is a compact, open-source **Vision-Language-Action model** that excels in robotics, outperforming larger models like **ACT** on various tasks while being trainable on consumer hardware.

- **🤗NO GPU left behind: Unlocking Efficiency with Co-located vLLM in TRL**  
  **Co-locating vLLM with TRL enhances GPU efficiency** by allowing both training and inference to share the same GPUs, significantly reducing idle time and hardware costs.

- **Bring Receipts: New NVIDIA AI Blueprint Detects Fraudulent Credit Card Transactions With Precision**  
  The **NVIDIA AI Blueprint** enhances fraud detection in credit card transactions by utilizing **accelerated data processing** and advanced algorithms, significantly improving accuracy and reducing false positives compared to traditional methods.