Group 1 - Bel Group has appointed Peter McGuinness as CEO of Bel North America to lead operations in the region [1][2] - McGuinness's responsibilities include accelerating growth, advancing M&A, and fostering innovation while enhancing sustainability [2][4] - Bel North America's portfolio features key brands such as Babybel and Boursin, with manufacturing facilities located in multiple states [4][5] Group 2 - The company is expanding capacity at its facilities in Wisconsin and South Dakota to meet increasing demand [5] - Bel Group reported a 3.2% organic revenue growth to €1.87 billion ($2.2 billion) for the six months ending June [6]

Core Insights - Bel Group is expanding its production of The Laughing Cow cheese in Spain, investing €1.5 million ($1.7 million) to add a 600m² building with two new packaging lines, which will increase annual output by 15% to nearly 7,000 tonnes, equivalent to about 500 million portions [1] - The Ulzama plant, operational since 1968, produces cheese portions for Spain and Portugal and employs around 140 people. The facility has also implemented a biomass boiler to replace fossil fuels, reducing CO₂ emissions by 500 tonnes annually, marking a significant step in Bel's decarbonisation strategy [2] - Bel's chief operations officer emphasized the company's dual focus on sustainability and profitability, highlighting the Ulzama site's transition to renewable energy and its expansion plans [3] Financial Performance - In the first half of 2025, Bel Group reported a 5.4% decline in consolidated net profit to €45.8 million, while recurring operating income fell by 19.3% to €125 million. However, consolidated net sales increased by 3.2% organically to €1.86 billion, driven by higher volumes and price increases that countered inflation in raw materials [4][5] - The company's core brands performed well, with Kiri sales rising by 8.2%, Mini Babybel by 6.1%, and Boursin by 7.3%, despite challenges from geopolitical tensions and increased consumer price sensitivity [6] Strategic Initiatives - Bel has set a target for all Babybel products to be packaged in recyclable paper by 2027, reflecting its commitment to sustainability [4] - The company acquired a 22.5% stake in Indonesian cheese maker Mulia Boga Raya, aiming to enhance cheese consumption in Indonesia and develop tailored innovations [4]

Core Viewpoint - The emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as a leading 3D modeling technology has introduced significant security vulnerabilities, particularly through a newly proposed attack method called Poison-Splat, which can drastically increase training costs and system failures [1][2][31]. Group 1: Introduction and Background - 3DGS has rapidly become a dominant technology in 3D vision, replacing NeRF due to its high rendering efficiency and realism [2][7]. - The adaptive nature of 3DGS, which adjusts computational resources based on scene complexity, is both a strength and a potential vulnerability [8][11]. - The research highlights a critical security blind spot in mainstream 3D reconstruction systems, revealing how minor alterations to input images can lead to significant operational disruptions [2][31]. Group 2: Attack Mechanism - The Poison-Splat attack targets the GPU memory usage and training time by introducing perturbations to input images, leading to increased computational costs [12][22]. - The attack is modeled as a max-min bi-level optimization problem, employing innovative strategies such as a proxy model to approximate the victim's behavior and maximizing the Total Variation (TV) of images to induce excessive complexity in 3DGS [13][16][15]. - The attack can significantly increase GPU memory usage from under 4GB to 80GB and training time by up to five times, demonstrating its effectiveness [25][22]. Group 3: Experimental Results - Experiments conducted on various 3D datasets showed that unconstrained attacks could lead to GPU memory usage surging by 20 times and rendering speeds dropping to one-tenth of the original [25][22]. - Even with constraints on pixel perturbations, the attack remains potent, with some scenarios showing over eightfold increases in memory consumption [27][22]. Group 4: Implications and Contributions - The research emphasizes that the findings are not merely academic but represent real threats to 3D service providers that allow user-uploaded content [31][40]. - Simple defenses, such as limiting the number of Gaussian points, are ineffective as they compromise the quality of 3D reconstructions [39][35]. - The study aims to raise awareness about the security of AI systems in 3D modeling, advocating for the development of more intelligent defense mechanisms [41][37].