Neural Events: Discrete Asynchronous Autoencoders for Event-Based Vision

Preprint, 2026

University of Zurich    University of Pennsylvania    The University of Tokyo    Keio University
Main video coming soon

Abstract

Event cameras capture dynamic scenes with exceptional temporal fidelity by representing them as a continuous stream of microsecond resolution events. Each individual event, however, only carries minimal semantic value, merely signaling a localized brightness change. To derive meaningful signals, downstream algorithms need to quickly integrate cues from a potentially massive torrent of low-information events. Current architectures are easily overwhelmed, struggling to balance capturing fine-grained temporal dynamics and maintaining a manageable data throughput. This paper proposes a framework to re-tokenize event streams into a small set of highly informative neural events, each representing a local spatio-temporal context window with a discrete learnable code. Every time this code flips, a neural event is triggered, yielding a highly compressed data stream. We demonstrate that, across object detection and classification, networks trained on neural events are on par or surpass the performance of state-of-the-art approaches while reducing the event rate by a factor of 2.0.

Method

Neural Events method overview

Neural Events compress raw event streams into a low-bandwidth asynchronous representation: raw events are embedded, processed by a linear-attention sequence model, mapped to a discrete codebook, and emitted only when the local code changes.

Experiment Videos

gen1_experiment

Qualitative experiment video for Neural Events.

BibTeX

@article{Pellerito2026NeuralEvents,
  title={Neural Events: Discrete Asynchronous Autoencoders for Event-Based Vision},
  author={Pellerito, Roberto and Gehrig, Daniel and Shiba, Shintaro and Scaramuzza, Davide},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.19835},
  year={2026}
}