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The curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis

MIT Technology Review

A new wave of theft is rocking the luxury car industry--mixing high-tech with old-school chop-shop techniques to snag vehicles while they're in transport. When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he'd found a perfect addition to his fleet. "It was very appealing to our clientele," he told me. As the director of operations at Dream Luxury Rental, he outfits customers in the Detroit area looking to ride in style to a wedding, a graduation, or any other event with high-end vehicles--Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Mercedes G-Wagons, and more. But before he could rent out the Rolls, Zahr needed to get the car to Detroit from Miami, where he bought it from a used-car dealer. His team posted the convertible on Central Dispatch, an online marketplace that's popular among car dealers, manufacturers, and owners who want to arrange vehicle shipments. It's not too complicated, at least in theory: A typical listing includes the type of vehicle, zip codes of the origin and destination, dates for pickup and delivery, and the fee. Anyone with a Central Dispatch account can see the job, and an individual carrier or transport broker who wants it can call the number on the listing. Zahr's team got a call from a transport company that wanted the job. They agreed on the price and scheduled pickup for January 17, 2025.


DualVision ArthroNav: Investigating Opportunities to Enhance Localization and Reconstruction in Image-based Arthroscopy Navigation via External Cameras

Shu, Hongchao, Seenivasan, Lalithkumar, Liu, Mingxu, Hwang, Yunseo, Ku, Yu-Chun, Knopf, Jonathan, Martin-Gomez, Alejandro, Armand, Mehran, Unberath, Mathias

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Arthroscopic procedures can greatly benefit from navigation systems that enhance spatial awareness, depth perception, and field of view. However, existing optical tracking solutions impose strict workspace constraints and disrupt surgical workflow. Vision-based alternatives, though less invasive, often rely solely on the monocular arthroscope camera, making them prone to drift, scale ambiguity, and sensitivity to rapid motion or occlusion. We propose DualVision ArthroNav, a multi-camera arthroscopy navigation system that integrates an external camera rigidly mounted on the arthroscope. The external camera provides stable visual odometry and absolute localization, while the monocular arthroscope video enables dense scene reconstruction. By combining these complementary views, our system resolves the scale ambiguity and long-term drift inherent in monocular SLAM and ensures robust relocalization. Experiments demonstrate that our system effectively compensates for calibration errors, achieving an average absolute trajectory error of 1.09 mm. The reconstructed scenes reach an average target registration error of 2.16 mm, with high visual fidelity (SSIM = 0.69, PSNR = 22.19). These results indicate that our system provides a practical and cost-efficient solution for arthroscopic navigation, bridging the gap between optical tracking and purely vision-based systems, and paving the way toward clinically deployable, fully vision-based arthroscopic guidance.


Powering Job Search at Scale: LLM-Enhanced Query Understanding in Job Matching Systems

Liu, Ping, Shen, Jianqiang, Shen, Qianqi, Yao, Chunnan, Kao, Kevin, Xu, Dan, Arora, Rajat, Zheng, Baofen, Johnson, Caleb, Hong, Liangjie, Wu, Jingwei, Zhang, Wenjing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Query understanding is essential in modern relevance systems, where user queries are often short, ambiguous, and highly context-dependent. Traditional approaches often rely on multiple task-specific Named Entity Recognition models to extract structured facets as seen in job search applications. However, this fragmented architecture is brittle, expensive to maintain, and slow to adapt to evolving taxonomies and language patterns. In this paper, we introduce a unified query understanding framework powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), designed to address these limitations. Our approach jointly models the user query and contextual signals such as profile attributes to generate structured interpretations that drive more accurate and personalized recommendations. The framework improves relevance quality in online A/B testing while significantly reducing system complexity and operational overhead. The results demonstrate that our solution provides a scalable and adaptable foundation for query understanding in dynamic web applications.


PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning

Kachuee, Mohammad, Gollapudi, Teja, Kim, Minseok, Huang, Yin, Sun, Kai, Yang, Xiao, Wang, Jiaqi, Shah, Nirav, Liu, Yue, Colak, Aaron, Kumar, Anuj, Yih, Wen-tau, Dong, Xin Luna

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often falls short when retrieved context includes confusing semi-relevant passages, or when answering questions require deep contextual understanding and reasoning. We propose an efficient fine-tuning framework, called PrismRAG, that (i) trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages, and (ii) instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without relying on extensive human engineered instructions. Evaluated across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks spanning diverse application domains and scenarios, PrismRAG improves average factuality by 5.4%, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions.


Swallow this pill to learn about your gut and health

FOX News

Celebrity nutritionist Daryl Gioffre, from Naples, Florida, tells Fox News Digital about the potential side effects of an ice cream emulsifier called Polysorbate 80, which alters the balance of gut bacteria. The future of gut health monitoring has arrived, thanks to researchers at the California Institute of Technology. Caltech's new invention, PillTrek, is a wireless smart capsule for gut health monitoring that delivers real-time insights from inside your gastrointestinal tract. This swallowable device promises to make invasive procedures a thing of the past, offering convenience and continuous data that traditional methods simply cannot match. Illustration of a woman holding a PillTrek near her mouth, about to swallow it.


Seamless Augmented Reality Integration in Arthroscopy: A Pipeline for Articular Reconstruction and Guidance

Shu, Hongchao, Liu, Mingxu, Seenivasan, Lalithkumar, Gu, Suxi, Ku, Ping-Cheng, Knopf, Jonathan, Taylor, Russell, Unberath, Mathias

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Arthroscopy is a minimally invasive surgical procedure used to diagnose and treat joint problems. The clinical workflow of arthroscopy typically involves inserting an arthroscope into the joint through a small incision, during which surgeons navigate and operate largely by relying on their visual assessment through the arthroscope. However, the arthroscope's restricted field of view and lack of depth perception pose challenges in navigating complex articular structures and achieving surgical precision during procedures. Aiming at enhancing intraoperative awareness, we present a robust pipeline that incorporates simultaneous localization and mapping, depth estimation, and 3D Gaussian splatting to realistically reconstruct intra-articular structures solely based on monocular arthroscope video. Extending 3D reconstruction to Augmented Reality (AR) applications, our solution offers AR assistance for articular notch measurement and annotation anchoring in a human-in-the-loop manner. Compared to traditional Structure-from-Motion and Neural Radiance Field-based methods, our pipeline achieves dense 3D reconstruction and competitive rendering fidelity with explicit 3D representation in 7 minutes on average. When evaluated on four phantom datasets, our method achieves RMSE = 2.21mm reconstruction error, PSNR = 32.86 and SSIM = 0.89 on average. Because our pipeline enables AR reconstruction and guidance directly from monocular arthroscopy without any additional data and/or hardware, our solution may hold the potential for enhancing intraoperative awareness and facilitating surgical precision in arthroscopy. Our AR measurement tool achieves accuracy within 1.59 +/- 1.81mm and the AR annotation tool achieves a mIoU of 0.721.


'What goes up, must come down:' Junk satellites are a looming hazard

Popular Science

Elon Musk's SpaceX and its competitors are making reliable, and decently-fast satellite internet services a reality thanks to a growing armada of shimmering satellites orbiting overhead. Through its constellation of over 6,000, 500-pound satellites, SpaceX's Starlink internet service already reportedly provides broadband to around three million global users, some in remote locations underserved by traditional internet providers. But what happens when all those aging satellites no longer serve their purpose? A new report from environmentally-focused advocacy group PIRG warns the current approach to decommissioning old satellites, which usually involves having them burn to a crisp when re-entering the atmosphere, lacks meaningful rules and regulation. That absence of oversight, they say, could lead to an increase in dangerous space junk affecting Earth, especially as competing satellite internet companies rush to build out and launch tens of thousands of new satellites into orbit.


DR-RAG: Applying Dynamic Document Relevance to Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Question-Answering

Hei, Zijian, Liu, Weiling, Ou, Wenjie, Qiao, Juyi, Jiao, Junming, Song, Guowen, Tian, Ting, Lin, Yi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently demonstrated the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the knowledge-intensive tasks such as Question-Answering (QA). RAG expands the query context by incorporating external knowledge bases to enhance the response accuracy. However, it would be inefficient to access LLMs multiple times for each query and unreliable to retrieve all the relevant documents by a single query. We have found that even though there is low relevance between some critical documents and query, it is possible to retrieve the remaining documents by combining parts of the documents with the query. To mine the relevance, a two-stage retrieval framework called Dynamic-Relevant Retrieval-Augmented Generation (DR-RAG) is proposed to improve document retrieval recall and the accuracy of answers while maintaining efficiency. Additionally, a compact classifier is applied to two different selection strategies to determine the contribution of the retrieved documents to answering the query and retrieve the relatively relevant documents. Meanwhile, DR-RAG call the LLMs only once, which significantly improves the efficiency of the experiment. The experimental results on multi-hop QA datasets show that DR-RAG can significantly improve the accuracy of the answers and achieve new progress in QA systems.


LinkLogic: A New Method and Benchmark for Explainable Knowledge Graph Predictions

Kumar-Singh, Niraj, Polleti, Gustavo, Paliwal, Saee, Hodos-Nkhereanye, Rachel

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While there are a plethora of methods for link prediction in knowledge graphs, state-of-the-art approaches are often black box, obfuscating model reasoning and thereby limiting the ability of users to make informed decisions about model predictions. Recently, methods have emerged to generate prediction explanations for Knowledge Graph Embedding models, a widely-used class of methods for link prediction. The question then becomes, how well do these explanation systems work? To date this has generally been addressed anecdotally, or through time-consuming user research. In this work, we present an in-depth exploration of a simple link prediction explanation method we call LinkLogic, that surfaces and ranks explanatory information used for the prediction. Importantly, we construct the first-ever link prediction explanation benchmark, based on family structures present in the FB13 dataset. We demonstrate the use of this benchmark as a rich evaluation sandbox, probing LinkLogic quantitatively and qualitatively to assess the fidelity, selectivity and relevance of the generated explanations. We hope our work paves the way for more holistic and empirical assessment of knowledge graph prediction explanation methods in the future.


The Morning After: Boston Dynamics' bi-ped Atlas robot is going into retirement

Engadget

Almost 11 years after Boston Dynamics revealed the Atlas humanoid robot, it's finally being retired. The DARPA-funded robot was designed for search-and-rescue missions, but it rose to fame thanks to videos showing off its dance moves and--let's be honest--rudimentary parkour skills. Atlas is trotting off into the sunset with one final YouTube video, thankfully including plenty of bloopers -- which are the best parts. Boston Dynamics, of course, has more commercially successful robots in its lineup, including Spot. Meta's Oversight Board will rule on AI-generated sexual images Motorola's Edge 50 phone series includes a wood option You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox.