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Final Call for Proposals: PyTorch Day China 2026

The Call for Proposals for PyTorch Day China 2026 closes November 10 at 23:59 China Standard Time. The event takes place in Beijing on December 12, bringing together PyTorch developers,... The post Final Call for Proposals: PyTorch Day China 2026 appeared first on PyTorch.

Do Pretrained Backbones Transfer to Physical Sensors? A Systematic Study of Multimodal Initialization Across the Sensor Stack

arXiv:2611.04034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning from pretrained backbones has become standard practice in multi-sensor computer vision---yet two questions remain open: which pretrained weights transfer best to multi-sensor setups, and can in-domain pretraining outperform off-the-shelf solutions? Frameworks like MultiMAE demonstrate the utility of masked autoencoding in a multi-modal context, but rely entirely on dense, model-derived modalities. It is unclear how robustly these methods translate to real-world applications that use physical sensors, where the aggregation of diverse public datasets for large-scale pretraining inherently introduces modality sparsity. To investigate this systematically, we curate a multi-sensor autonomous driving collection of $2.82M$ images from 16 publicly available datasets, incorporating both physical hardware modalities (RGB, LWIR, NIR, Event) and model-derived modalities (Stereo Depth, Segmentation). We use this collection for in-domain pretraining based on the MultiMAE approach. We adapt MultiMAE's loss formulation to accommodate sparse samples, and study the effect of an enforced encoder bottleneck for modality alignment and of additional losses specific to dense reconstruction (SSIM and FFT). We then systematically compare against common pretrained backbones (ViT, MAE, DINO and MultiMAE) across downstream sensor fusion tasks. We find that MultiMAE is a surprisingly strong out-of-the-box baseline, transferring effectively even to modalities it has never seen, while our targeted modifications yield incremental but consistent improvements on multi-sensor transfer and overall robustness.

An agent that helps users snatch up iPhone foldable-screen models is reshaping e-commerce in the AI era.

Shopify AI saw transaction orders grow by a factor of 13. In the early morning of October 16, pre-orders began for Apple’s first foldable-screen phone, the iPhone Duo. Priced from $1,999, initial production capacity was tight, and delivery dates quickly slipped to January next year. This time, it wasn’t just people glued to their screens vying for the launch. This year, Agents have become the strictest “parents” to iPhone Duo scalpers. | Image source: Apple On the MacRumors forum, one user who missed out vented their frustration, while on Reddit others boasted about using Muse bots to snatch up multiple units in a single go—before even a human could click, the inventory had already been swept away by AI. Muse is Meta’s personal Agent, launched on September 8; shortly after its debut, it topped the free charts in the U.S. App Store, with downloads soon surpassing 2.5 million. According to Meta, shopping has become one of Muse’s primary use cases. Around the time the iPhone Duo went on sale, Muse even released a new version optimized for this device, with an update note that emphasized making in‑chat shopping more convenient. AI-driven shopping has moved from demo stages at product launches straight into real‑world stock‑picking scenarios. But not every retailer welcomes these new customers. In late September, Amazon began banning Muse. By October, users of Musk’s Grok Bot encountered the same warning when placing orders on Amazon: unauthorized AI agents continuing to access the platform violates Amazon’s terms of service. Meanwhile, another company, Shopify, took the exact opposite approach. On September 21, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke announced a deep partnership with Muse, enabling Muse to process checkout through Shop Pay across all Shopify stores. And Shopify’s financial reports already show early returns from this strategy: in the first quarter of this year, orders generated via AI search grew nearly thirteenfold year over year, while store traffic driven by AI increased eightfold. Closing doors on one hand, opening them on the other—when more and more purchasing decisions are handed over to Agents, will the question of “whether or not to let Agents in” become…

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DriveMind: Mind-Evolving Belief Tracking for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2610.32069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perceive a traffic scene, reason about it, and propose a driving action within a single model. However, existing MLLM-based drivers reason from scratch at each frame and commit to a single explanation, discarding earlier hypotheses about the scene. When the scene is ambiguous, the agent locks in on the wrong interpretation and acts on it before evidence accumulates. In this paper, we propose DriveMind, an MLLM-based driving framework that keeps several hypotheses about the scene alive at the same time and updates their weights as new frames arrive. Inspired by particle filtering, DriveMind propagates each hypothesis through a VLM, scores it against the current observation, and resamples to m

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