Europe
Re-coding for Uncertainties: Edge-awareness Semantic Concordance for Resilient Event-RGB Segmentation
Semantic segmentation has achieved great success in ideal conditions. However, when facing extreme conditions (e.g., insufficient light, fierce camera motion), most existing methods suffer from significant information loss of RGB, severely damaging segmentation results. Several researches exploit the high-speed and high-dynamic event modality as a complement, but event and RGB are naturally heterogeneous, which leads to feature-level mismatch and inferior optimization of existing multi-modality methods. Different from these researches, we delve into the edge secret of both modalities for resilient fusion and propose a novel Edge-awareness Semantic Concordance framework to unify the multi-modality heterogeneous features with latent edge cues. In this framework, we first propose Edge-awareness Latent Re-coding, which obtains uncertainty indicators while realigning event-RGB features into unified semantic space guided by re-coded distribution, and transfers event-RGB distributions into re-coded features by utilizing a pre-established edge dictionary as clues. We then propose Re-coded Consolidation and Uncertainty Optimization, which utilize re-coded edge features and uncertainty indicators to solve the heterogeneous event-RGB fusion issues under extreme conditions. We establish two synthetic and one real-world event-RGB semantic segmentation datasets for extreme scenario comparisons. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by a 2.55% mIoU on our proposed DERS-XS, and possesses superior resilience under spatial occlusion. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/ESC.
An Analytical Theory of Spectral Bias in the Learning Dynamics of Diffusion Models
We develop an analytical framework for understanding how the generated distribution evolves during diffusion model training. Leveraging a Gaussian-equivalence principle, we solve the full-batch gradient-flow dynamics of linear and convolutional denoisers and integrate the resulting probability-flow ODE, yielding analytic expressions for the generated distribution. The theory exposes a universal inverse-variance spectral law: the time for an eigen-or Fourier mode to match its target variance scales as ฯ ฮป 1, so high-variance (coarse) structure is mastered orders of magnitude sooner than low-variance (fine) detail. Extending the analysis to deep linear networks and circulant full-width convolutions shows that weight sharing merely multiplies learning rates--accelerating but not eliminating the bias--whereas local convolution introduces a qualitatively different bias. Experiments on Gaussian and natural-image datasets confirm the spectral law persists in deep MLP-based UNet.
Sparse Autoencoders Learn Monosemantic Features in Vision-Language Models
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of SAEs to Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, and introduce a comprehensive framework for evaluating monosemanticity at the neuron-level in visual representations. To ensure that our evaluation aligns with human perception, we propose a benchmark derived from a large-scale user study. Our experimental results reveal that SAEs trained on VLMs significantly enhance the monosemanticity of individual neurons, with sparsity and wide latents being the most influential factors. Further, we demonstrate that applying SAE interventions on CLIP's vision encoder directly steers multimodal LLM outputs (e.g., LLaVA), without any modifications to the underlying language model. These findings emphasize the practicality and efficacy of SAEs as an unsupervised tool for enhancing both interpretability and control of VLMs.
Prime Day Knocked Hundreds Off Our Top Pool-Cleaning Robots (2026)
Summer is for relaxing, not cleaning. Upgrade your backyard setup with a robot that cleans your pool for you. As the owner of an above-ground pool, I can attest that cleaning leaves, bugs, and other detritus is an everyday chore if the cover is off. I put up with it since my pool is only in use seasonally, but WIRED reviewer Chris Null has an in-ground pool he uses year-round, so he does not have time for foolery like nets, brushes, and manual vacuums. He has been testing pool robots for years, and his favorite robot he's ever tried has been from Beatbot.
The Best Amazon Prime Day Headphone Deals (2026)
A cheaper, poppier follow-up to Nothing's superb Headphone (1), these stylish noise-canceling headphones look great and boast a full-bodied sound profile that's perfect for pop and electronic music. There's a slick app for adjusting sound profiles, battery life can hit 135 hours with ANC off, and there's even USB-C audio cable included for hi-res listening.
Best Prime Day Vacuum Deals (2026): Shark, Dyson, Bissell
These Prime Day vacuum deals will give your home the cleanest summer yet. The summer sale extravaganza has come early this year, and while this is one of many sale events you'll see between now and the holidays, these Prime Day vacuum deals are worth taking a look at. You can get my favorite cordless vacuum, the Shark PowerDetect ($300) for $100 cheaper than usual, or the already affordable Bissell PowerClean FurFinder ($150) with an extra discount. The best robot vacuum we've tried, the Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal ($850) also has a fantastic price tag this week for how powerful it is, and you can get great wet vacuums like the Narwal S30 Pro ($330) on sale too. All of these models and more that we've tested and love are on sale right now.
7813e19a86fd73d40f7e811ab15f6d5f-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
Long-separated research has been conducted on two highly correlated tracks: traffic and incidents. Traffic track witnesses complicating deep learning models, e.g., to push the prediction a few percent more accurate, and the incident track only studies the incidents alone, e.g., to infer the incident risk. We, for the first time, spatiotemporally aligned the two tracks in a large-scale region (16,972 traffic nodes) from year 2022 to 2024: our TraffiDent dataset includes traffic, i.e., time-series indexes on traffic flow, lane occupancy, and average vehicle speed, and incident, whose records are spatiotemporally aligned with traffic data, with seven different incident classes. Additionally, each node includes detailed physical and policylevel meta-attributes of lanes. Previous datasets typically contain only traffic or incident data in isolation, limiting research to general forecasting tasks.
ReDi: Rectified Discrete Flow
Discrete Flow-based Models (DFMs) are powerful generative models for highquality discrete data but typically suffer from slow sampling speeds due to their reliance on iterative decoding processes. This reliance on a multi-step process originates from the factorization approximation of DFMs, which is necessary for handling high-dimensional data. In this paper, we analyze the factorization approximation error using Conditional Total Correlation (TC), and reveal its dependence on the coupling. To address the challenge of efficient few-step generation, we propose Rectified Discrete Flow (ReDi), a novel iterative method that reduces the underlying factorization error (measured as Conditional TC) by rectifying the coupling between source and target distributions. We theoretically prove that each ReDi step guarantees a monotonic decreasing Conditional TC, ensuring its convergence. Empirically, ReDi significantly reduces Conditional TC and enables few-step generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that the rectified couplings are well-suited for training efficient one-step models on image generation. ReDi offers a simple and theoretically grounded approach for tackling the few-step challenge, providing a new perspective on efficient discrete data synthesis.