Understanding verbs is crucial to modelling how people and objects interact with each other and the environment through space and time. Recently, state-of-the-art video-language models based on CLIP have been shown to have limited verb understanding and to rely extensively on nouns, restricting their performance in real-world video applications that require action and temporal understanding. In this work, we improve verb understanding for CLIP-based video-language models by proposing a new Verb-Focused Contrastive (VFC) framework. This consists of two main components: (1) leveraging pretrained large language models (LLMs) to create hard negatives for cross-modal contrastive learning, together with a calibration strategy to balance the occurrence of concepts in positive and negative pairs; and (2) enforcing a fine-grained, verb phrase alignment loss. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results for zero-shot performance on three downstream tasks that focus on verb understanding: video-text matching, video question-answering and video classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which proposes a method to alleviate the verb understanding problem, and does not simply highlight it.

Sex tech returned for another year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), with several companies showcasing a range of erotic devices that improve both men's and women's performance and experience between the sheets. Satisfyer brought a trove of vibrators to the Las Vegas tech conference, all of which pair to a smartphone and some use the power of air to stimulate the body. Health tech pioneer Lora DiCarlo is back for her third CES since the ban on sex tech was lifted in 2020 and this year her company a micro-bot that simulates a human mouth, providing gentle massage and pressure to remedy sexual dysfunction among women. Technologies to increase men's sexual performance are also present at the conference, with one firm debuting a smart patch that prolongs sexual intercourse. Satisfyer brought a trove of vibrators to this year's Consumer Electronics Show, joining several other companies in the sex tech industry Sex tech was banned from attending CES after its 2019 event, but the event's organizers came under fire for the move and brought back in 2020 on a trial basis.

When news is slow, we ask a computer to use futuristic intelligence algorithms to generate news stories for us, thanks to a website we found called TalkToTransformer.com. We type in the beginning of a news story, and let the computers do the rest. Now, let us read you some of these stories with our human mouths so the robots will spare us in the great Future War Against Machines in 2077. Today's stories: Donkey Kong Arrested for Animal Abuse, Crash Bandicoot Seriously Injures a Young Man, A Fisherman in Legend of Zelda Is Bitten by an Octopus and Batman Can't Stop Farting Near Babies. We thank our robot overlords for giving us an opportunity to serve and spread the good news they have invented for our human mouths to speak.