February 2026

Shifting from price hikes to persuasion, Coca-Cola’s latest strategy signals how AI is moving deeper into the core of corporate marketing. Recent coverage of the company’s leadership discussions shows that Coca-Cola is entering what executives describe as a new phase focused on influence not pricing power. According to Mi-3, the company is changing its focus from “price to persuasion,” with digital platforms, AI, and in-store execution becoming increasingly important in building demand. This reflects a change in consumer […]

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In this paper, we present a framework for enabling autonomous vehicles to interact with cyclists in a manner that balances safety and optimality. The approach integrates Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis with deep Q-learning to jointly address safety guarantees and time-efficient navigation. A value function is computed as the solution to a time-dependent Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman inequality, providing a quantitative measure of safety for each system state. This safety metric is incorporated as a structured reward signal within a reinforcement learning framework. […]

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Following the evolution from theoretical foundations to advanced deep learning algorithms, a coherent overview of reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed in this tutorial. We begin with the mathematical formalization of sequential decision-making via Markov decision processes (MDPs). In MDP, Bellman equation and Bellman optimality equation play important roles, they provide for policy evaluation and the fundamental condition for optimal behavior, respectively. The movement from these equations to practical algorithms is explored, starting with model-based dynamic programming and progressing […]

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Dual-to-Dual MLLMs refer to Multimodal Large Language Models, which can enable unified multimodal comprehension and generation through text and image modalities. Although exhibiting strong instantaneous learning and generalization capabilities, Dual-to-Dual MLLMs still remain deficient in lifelong evolution, significantly affecting continual adaptation to dynamic real-world scenarios. One of the challenges is that learning new tasks inevitably destroys the learned knowledge. Beyond traditional catastrophic forgetting, Dual-to-Dual MLLMs face other challenges, including hallucination, instruction unfollowing, and failures in cross-modal knowledge transfer. […]

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The energy management problem in the context of smart grids is inherently complex due to the interdependencies among diverse system components. Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been proposed for solving Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problems, the requirement for iterative interaction with an environment often necessitates computationally expensive simulators, leading to significant sample inefficiency. In this study, these challenges are addressed through the use of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), which can replace conventional and costly smart grid simulators. The […]

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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the reward and learn an unintended behavior. Most previous works address this by limiting the policy update with a Kullback-Leibler (KL) penalty towards a reference model. We propose a different framing: Train the LM in a way that biases policy updates towards regions […]

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The construction of partial minimum spanning trees being NP-hard, several heuristic algorithms have already been formulated. Many of these heuristics (such as Kruskal’s) use shortest paths to connect the components of the tree. In this work, we present an approximate construction algorithm for the minimum Steiner tree (the optimal tree for diffusion multicast). This construction is based on graph-related structures more advantageous than shortest paths. The algorithm uses connections like simple Steiner trees if necessary. These simple trees […]

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