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The Best Automatic Litter Box of 2026: Petkit and Litter-Robot

WIRED

With these high-tech automatic litter boxes, gone are the days of scooping and smells. I can confidently say that having an automatic litter box has been the biggest game changer for me when it comes to cat ownership. I can't recommend them enough. They can be pricey, but never having to scoop poop again is priceless. We at WIRED--well, our WIRED cats--tested a dozen of the highest-rated and most technologically advanced automatic litter boxes on the market for at least a week, often more (using standard clay clumping litter unless otherwise indicated), to see if they were really worth the money--or the hype. Our new favorite automatic litter box is the Purobot Max Pro 2 because of its compact design and camera for monitoring. The Litter-Robot 4 is a close second, mostly because of its LitterHopper attachment that easily refills litter for you. Plus, we still love the more basic Petkit PuraMax 2 (and think it's a great option for most people). Check out our related guides, like the Best Automatic Feeders, Best Cat Water Fountains, Best Pet Cameras, and Best Cat Toys . We've got you covered; see our Best Dog Accessories . The Purobot Max Pro 2 is the newest model from Petkit.


Connectivity Estimation using Stochastic Graph Heat Modelling

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A growing number of techniques leverage the spatial structures that underlie many real-world datasets. Despite these advances, the complementary task of estimating spatial structures and understanding their role within these techniques has often been overlooked. In neurophysiological data analysis specifically, numerous methods exist to estimate brain connectivity, but most are not explicitly model-based, dynamic, multivariate, or directed. To address these limitations, we previously introduced noise-driven heat modelling on graphs for neurophysiological connectivity estimation. In this study, we extend this framework by relaxing earlier noise assumptions and adding regularisation to improve robustness. We also develop a simulation procedure to characterise and evaluate our technique in a controlled setting. Finally, we demonstrate that the technique is able to capture meaningful spatial structure across two experiments, each using two real-world datasets. The explicit model formulation of our connectivity estimator has the potential to improve the interpretability of graph-based techniques across a wide range of applications. The code implementing our method is available at https://github.com/sgoerttler/Heat_Connectivity.


The 200 lie: Why nobody needs an expensive gaming mouse

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Then why not go for the latest flagship mouse with 50,000 DPI! Add to that an 8,000 Hz polling rate, third-generation optical switches, and a whole host of buzzwords that sound like they've come straight out of a NASA lab, a World Cup, or an influencer's lifestyle. The most important question isn't even being asked amidst all this consumer voodoo: who actually needs this? Fifteen or twenty years ago, expensive gaming mice really were a noticeable upgrade. Back then, many standard devices still had imprecise sensors, suffered from "angle snapping" (unintended line straightening), or simply refused to work at all during fast movements - a sure-fire virtual death sentence for ambitious gamers.


7813e19a86fd73d40f7e811ab15f6d5f-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

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.


MoE-Gyro: Self-Supervised Over-Range Reconstruction and Denoising for MEMSGyroscopes

Neural Information Processing Systems

MEMS gyroscopes play a critical role in inertial navigation and motion control applications but typically suffer from a fundamental trade-off between measurement range and noise performance. Existing hardware-based solutions aimed at mitigating this issue introduce additional complexity, cost, and scalability challenges. Deep-learning methods primarily focus on noise reduction and typically require precisely aligned ground-truth signals, making them difficult to deploy in practical scenarios and leaving the fundamental trade-off unresolved. To address these challenges, we introduce Mixture of Experts for MEMSGyroscopes (MoEGyro), a novel self-supervised framework specifically designed for simultaneous over-range signal reconstruction and noise suppression. MoE-Gyro employs two experts: an Over-Range Reconstruction Expert (ORE), featuring a Gaussian-Decay Attention mechanism for reconstructing saturated segments; and a Denoise Expert (DE), utilizing dual-branch complementary masking combined with FFT-guided augmentation for robust noise reduction. A lightweight gating module dynamically routes input segments to the appropriate expert.


Toward Artificial Palpation: Representation Learning of Touch on Soft Bodies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Palpation, the use of touch in medical examination, is almost exclusively performed by humans. We investigate a proof of concept for an artificial palpation method based on self-supervised learning. Our key idea is that an encoder-decoder framework can learn a representation from a sequence of tactile measurements that contains all the relevant information about the palpated object. We conjecture that such a representation can be used for downstream tasks such as tactile imaging and change detection. With enough training data, it should capture intricate patterns in the tactile measurements that go beyond a simple map of forces - the current state of the art. To validate our approach, we both develop a simulation environment and collect a real-world dataset of soft objects and corresponding ground truth images obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We collect palpation sequences using a robot equipped with a tactile sensor, and train a model that predicts sensory readings at different positions on the object. We investigate the representation learned in this process, and demonstrate its use in imaging and change detection.


Universal Visuo-Tactile Video Understanding for Embodied Interaction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tactile perception is essential for embodied agents to understand physical attributes of objects that cannot be determined through visual inspection alone. While existing approaches have made progress in visual and language modalities for physical understanding, they fail to effectively incorporate tactile information that provides crucial haptic feedback for real-world interaction.


UrbanIng-V2X: ALarge-Scale Multi-Vehicle, Multi-Infrastructure Dataset Across Multiple Intersections for Cooperative Perception

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent cooperative perception datasets have played a crucial role in advancing smart mobility applications by enabling information exchange between intelligent agents, helping to overcome challenges such as occlusions and improving overall scene understanding. While some existing real-world datasets incorporate both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure interactions, they are typically limited to a single intersection or a single vehicle. A comprehensive perception dataset featuring multiple connected vehicles and infrastructure sensors across several intersections remains unavailable, limiting the benchmarking of algorithms in diverse traffic environments. Consequently, overfitting can occur, and models may demonstrate misleadingly high performance due to similar intersection layouts and traffic participant behavior. To address this gap, we introduce UrbanIng-V2X, the first large-scale, multi-modal dataset supporting cooperative perception involving vehicles and infrastructure sensors deployed across three urban intersections in Ingolstadt, Germany. UrbanIng-V2X consists of 34 temporally aligned and spatially calibrated sensor sequences, each lasting 20 seconds. All sequences contain recordings from one of three intersections, involving two vehicles and up to three infrastructure-mounted sensor poles operating in coordinated scenarios. In total, UrbanIng-V2X provides data from 12 vehicle-mounted RGB cameras, 2 vehicle LiDARs, 17 infrastructure thermal cameras, and 12 infrastructure LiDARs. All sequences are annotated at a frequency of 10 Hz with 3D bounding boxes spanning 13 object classes, resulting in approximately 712k annotated instances across the dataset.


Appendices and Supplementary Material

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Coordinate Systems and Transformation To achieve spatial synchronization between different sensors, vehicle-vehicle-UAV collaboration requires using sensor parameter information to perform coordinate system transformations. The relationships between the coordinate systems are illustrated in Fig. S 1. Figure 1: Relationship between coordinate systems. The pixel coordinate system refers to a two-dimensional coordinate system defined on the image plane, typically represented as (u,v), with units in pixels. In this system, the origin is located at the top-left corner of the image, the u-axis points to the right along the horizontal direction, and the v-axis points downward along the vertical direction. This coordinate system is used to describe the position of points on the two-dimensional image captured by the camera.