Technology
This 13 Amazon plug can make almost any appliance smarter
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Amazon's Smart Plug has dropped to $12.99, making it an affordable way to turn ordinary household devices into Alexa-controlled smart home gadgets. Amazon's Smart Plug is down to $12.99, matching the lowest price we've seen since last year. For a single plug that adds voice control to almost any outlet, that's a hard price to argue with, especially ahead of Prime Day. This device is as straightforward as it gets. There's no separate hub to buy or wire in.
From Condensation to Rank Collapse: ATwo-Stage Analysis of Transformer Training Dynamics
Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical evidence showing improved reasoning capabilities under small initialization scales in language models, we employ the gradient flow analytical framework established in Zhou et al. [2022] to systematically investigate linearized Transformer training dynamics.
Model Based Policy Adaptation for Closed Loop End to End Autonomous Driving
End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving models have demonstrated strong performance in open-loop evaluations but often suffer from cascading errors and poor generalization in closed-loop settings. To address this gap, we propose Modelbased Policy Adaptation (MPA), a general framework that enhances the robustness and safety of pretrained E2E driving agents during deployment. MPA first generates diverse counterfactual trajectories using a geometry-consistent simulation engine, exposing the agent to scenarios beyond the original dataset. Based on this generated data, MPA trains a diffusion-based policy adapter to refine the base policy's predictions and a multi-step Q value model to evaluate long-term outcomes. At inference time, the adapter proposes multiple trajectory candidates, and the Q value model selects the one with the highest expected utility. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark using a photorealistic closed-loop simulator demonstrate that MPA significantly improves performance across in-domain, out-of-domain, and safety-critical scenarios. We further investigate how the scale of counterfactual data and inference-time guidance strategies affect overall effectiveness.
Next Semantic Scale Prediction via Hierarchical Diffusion Language Models
In this paper we introduce Hierarchical Diffusion Language Models (HDLM) - a novel family of discrete diffusion models for language modeling. HDLM builds on a hierarchical vocabulary where low-level tokens with detailed semantics are surjectively mapped to high-level tokens with coarse-grained meanings. In the forward process, each token is independently perturbed to its higher-level ancestor with more abstract semantics according to the scheduler, while in the reverse process the model progressively predicts the next, more detailed semantics. Taken together, HDLM provides a general time-varying next semantic scale prediction process for language modeling. We derive closed-form expressions for the diffusion Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), and show that HDLM can be implemented in a flexible manner while including the existing MDLM as a special case. We also propose practical training techniques based on the insights. Extensive text generation experiments validate the effectiveness of HDLM, which demonstrates consistently lower validation and generative perplexity than baselines.
UltraLED: Learning to See Everything in Ultra-High Dynamic Range Scenes
Such conditions are commonly encountered in nighttime scenes with light sources. Even with standard exposure settings, a bimodal intensity distribution with boundary peaks often emerges, making it difficult to preserve both highlight and shadow details simultaneously. RGB-based bracketing methods can capture details at both ends using short-long exposure pairs, but are susceptible to misalignment and ghosting artifacts. We found that a shortexposure image already retains sufficient highlight detail. The main challenge of UHDR reconstruction lies in denoising and recovering information in dark regions.
SmokeViz: ALarge-Scale Satellite Dataset for Wildfire Smoke Detection and Segmentation
The global rise in wildfire frequency and intensity over the past decade underscores the need for improved fire monitoring techniques. To advance deep learning research on wildfire detection and its associated human health impacts, we introduce SmokeViz, a large-scale machine learning dataset of smoke plumes in satellite imagery. The dataset is derived from expert annotations created by smoke analysts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provide coarse temporal and spatial approximations of smoke presence. To enhance annotation precision, we propose pseudo-label dimension reduction (PLDR), a generalizable method that applies pseudo-labeling to refine datasets with mismatching temporal and/or spatial resolutions. Unlike typical pseudo-labeling applications that aim to increase the number of labeled samples, PLDR maintains the original labels but increases the dataset quality by solving for intermediary pseudo-labels (IPLs) that align each annotation to the most representative input data. For SmokeViz, a parent model produces IPLs to identify the single satellite image within each annotations time window that best corresponds with the smoke plume. This refinement process produces a succinct and relevant deep learning dataset consisting of over 160,000 manual annotations. The SmokeViz dataset is expected to be a valuable resource to develop further wildfire-related machine learning models and is publicly available at https://noaa-gsl-experimental-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/index.
Windows 11 update is breaking some PCs with boot and BitLocker issues
PCWorld reports that Windows 11 update KB5094126 is causing severe boot failures, BitLocker recovery loops, and blue screens on business PCs. HP EliteBook and Dell Precision systems are particularly vulnerable due to insufficient EFI partition space for new boot components and Secure Boot certificates.
Beef tea was all the rage in the 1800s
A cup a day kept the doctor away--at least according to these 19th century remedies. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Australian boxing manager and trainer Tom Maguire gives Australian boxer Dave Sands a cup of beef tea in his bedroom at their London hotel in April 1949. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .
OCTDiff: Bridged Diffusion Model for Portable OCT Super-Resolution and Enhancement
Medical imaging super-resolution is critical for improving diagnostic utility and reducing costs, particularly for low-cost modalities such as portable Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). We propose OCTDiff, a bridged diffusion model designed to enhance image resolution and quality from portable OCT devices. Our image-to-image diffusion framework addresses key challenges in the conditional generation process of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). We introduce Adaptive Noise Aggregation (ANA), a novel module to improve denoising dynamics within the reverse diffusion process. Additionally, we integrate Multi-Scale Cross-Attention (MSCA) into the U-Net backbone to capture local dependencies across spatial resolutions. To address overfitting on small clinical datasets and to preserve fine structural details essential for retinal diagnostics, we design a customized loss function guided by clinical quality scores. OCTDiff outperforms convolutional baselines and standard DDPMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on clinical portable OCT datasets. Our model and its downstream applications have the potential to generalize to other medical imaging modalities and revolutionize the current workflow of ophthalmic diagnostics.