John Healey talked of charting a new course for Britain, but this Budget was more about course-correcting than charging down a new path. It was abundantly clear that the financial fallout from that conflict in the Middle East has hampered the finances of households and businesses - and the government's ability to help. While the government targeted those impacted by higher energy and fuel bills, the breathing space it aimed to provide was limited; it is a pill that doesn't fully alleviate the pain. The most telling evidence was that official forecasters predict that while earnings will rise, that is not compensating for higher prices and taxes. Even after the extra help is taken into account, households' incomes after inflation and tax are set to be typically lower across the next two years than the start of the parliament, a sign of how much the war has blown prosperity off course.

Lane detection is an important yet challenging task in autonomous driving systems. Existing lane detection methods mainly rely on finer-scale information to identify key points of lane lines. Since local information in realistic road environments is frequently obscured by other vehicles or affected by poor outdoor lighting conditions, these methods struggle with the regression of such key points. In this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Transformer with hierarchical refinement for lane detection to improve the detection accuracy in complex road environments. Specifically, we propose a high-to-low hierarchical refinement Transformer structure, called LAne TRansformer (LATR), to refine the key points of lane lines, which integrates global semantics information and finer-scale features. Moreover, exploiting the thin and long characteristics of lane lines, we propose a novel Curve-IoU loss to supervise the fit of lane lines. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets of lane detection demonstrate that our proposed new method achieves state-of-the-art results with high accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, our method achieves improved F1 scores on the OpenLane dataset, surpassing the current best-performing method by 5.0 points.

Work done during an internship at Baidu Inc.

(Algorithm 1). Then, we propose another strategy (Algorithm 2) to solve FSPCA for the general covariance by iteratively building a carefully designed proxy.

Generative search engines based on large language models (LLMs) are replacing traditional search, fundamentally changing how information providers are compensated. To sustain this ecosystem, we need fair mechanisms to attribute and compensate content providers based on their contributions to generated answers. We introduce MaxShapley, an efficient algorithm for fair attribution in generative search pipelines that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). MaxShapley is a special case of the celebrated Shapley value; it leverages a decomposable max-sum utility function to compute attributions with linear computation in the number of documents, as opposed to the exponential cost of Shapley values. We evaluate MaxShapley on three multi-hop QA datasets (HotPotQA, MuSiQUE, MS MARCO); MaxShapley achieves comparable attribution quality to exact Shapley computation, while consuming a fraction of its tokens--for instance, it gives up to an 8x reduction in resource consumption over prior state-of-the-art methods at the same attribution accuracy.

Japan's bear-related casualties hit record on escalating attacks Bear bells are displayed for sale at a souvenir shop at Shirakawa-go, a popular tourist spot and one of Japan's UNESCO World Heritage sites, in the village of Shirakawa, Gifu Prefecture, on Nov. 15. A record 230 were killed or injured by bears in Japan since April, putting more pressure on the government to intervene as the animals push deeper into areas where people live. Thirteen have died and 217 were injured as a result of bear attacks in the eight months through end-November, according to data released Friday by the environment ministry. The total already exceeds the previous record of 219 for the fiscal year through March 2024. Roughly two-thirds of casualties occurred in the sparsely-populated northern Tohoku region.

'U.S. sanctions equate us with drug traffickers,' ICC deputy prosecutor says The Hague - The deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Friday lashed out at U.S. sanctions, arguing they effectively put top court officials on a par with terrorists and drug traffickers. In a wide-ranging interview, Mame Mandiaye Niang also said it would be conceivable to hold an in-absentia hearing against high-level ICC targets such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sixty-five-year-old Niang, along with top ICC judges, is subject to sanctions from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, in retaliation at the court's arrest warrants for Netanyahu over Israel's campaign in Gaza. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

AI chatbots can sway voters' political views, studies say Paris - A brief conversation with a partisan AI chatbot can influence voters' political views, studies published Thursday found, with evidence-backed arguments -- true or not -- proving particularly persuasive. Experiments with generative artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4o and Chinese alternative DeepSeek, found they were able to shift supporters of Republican Donald Trump toward his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris by almost four points on a 100-point scale ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Opposition supporters in 2025 polls in Canada and Poland meanwhile had their views shifted by up to 10 points after chatting with a bot programmed to persuade. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.