☆ FineLAP: Taming Heterogeneous Supervision for Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining

Xiquan Li, Xuenan Xu, Ziyang Ma, Wenxi Chen, Haolin He, Qiuqiang Kong, Xie Chen

Contrastively pretrained audio-language models (e.g., CLAP) excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks. Existing extensions fail to exploit the varying granularity of real-world audio-text data, where massive clip-level textual descriptions coexist with limited frame-level annotations. This paper proposes Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining (FineLAP), a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data. FineLAP introduces a dual-stream sigmoid loss with a cluster-based sampling strategy to jointly learn from clip- and frame-level supervision. To capture both global semantics and local details, FineLAP uses a decoupled audio projector on top of a self-supervised encoder. To alleviate the scarcity of temporally annotated data, we present FineLAP-100k, a large-scale synthetic SED dataset constructed through a scalable curation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FineLAP achieves SOTA performance across multiple audio understanding tasks, including retrieval, classification, sound event detection, and text-to-audio grounding. Ablation studies further show that coarse- and fine-grained alignment are mutually beneficial, providing insights for building better audio-language models (ALMs).

☆ TRACE: Training-Free Partial Audio Deepfake Detection via Embedding Trajectory Analysis of Speech Foundation Models

Awais Khan, Muhammad Umar Farooq, Kutub Uddin, Khalid Malik

Partial audio deepfakes, where synthesized segments are spliced into genuine recordings, are particularly deceptive because most of the audio remains authentic. Existing detectors are supervised: they require frame-level annotations, overfit to specific synthesis pipelines, and must be retrained as new generative models emerge. We argue that this supervision is unnecessary. We hypothesize that speech foundation models implicitly encode a forensic signal: genuine speech forms smooth, slowly varying embedding trajectories, while splice boundaries introduce abrupt disruptions in frame-level transitions. Building on this, we propose TRACE (Training-free Representation-based Audio Countermeasure via Embedding dynamics), a training-free framework that detects partial audio deepfakes by analyzing the first-order dynamics of frozen speech foundation model representations without any training, labeled data, or architectural modification. We evaluate TRACE on four benchmarks that span two languages using six speech foundation models. In PartialSpoof, TRACE achieves 8.08% EER, competitive with fine-tuned supervised baselines. In LlamaPartialSpoof, the most challenging benchmark featuring LLM-driven commercial synthesis, TRACE surpasses a supervised baseline outright (24.12% vs. 24.49% EER) without any target-domain data. These results show that temporal dynamics in speech foundation models provide an effective, generalize signal for training-free audio forensics.

☆ Sona: Real-Time Multi-Target Sound Attenuation for Noise Sensitivity

Jeremy Zhengqi Huang, Emani Hicks, Sidharth, Gillian R. Hayes, Dhruv Jain

For people with noise sensitivity, everyday soundscapes can be overwhelming. Existing tools such as active noise cancellation reduce discomfort by suppressing the entire acoustic environment, often at the cost of awareness of surrounding people and events. We present Sona, an interactive mobile system for real-time soundscape mediation that selectively attenuates bothersome sounds while preserving desired audio. Sona is built on a target-conditioned neural pipeline that supports simultaneous attenuation of multiple overlapping sound sources, overcoming the single-target limitation of prior systems. It runs in real time on-device and supports user-extensible sound classes through in-situ audio examples, without retraining. Sona is informed by a formative study with 68 noise-sensitive individuals. Through technical benchmarking and an in-situ study with 10 participants, we show that Sona achieves low-latency, multi-target attenuation suitable for live listening, and enables meaningful reductions in bothersome sounds while maintaining awareness of surroundings. These results point toward a new class of personal AI systems that support comfort and social participation by mediating real-world acoustic environments.

comment: 12 pages, 6 figures

♻ ☆ Enhancing Infant Crying Detection with Gradient Boosting for Improved Emotional and Mental Health Diagnostics

Kyunghun Lee, Lauren M. Henry, Eleanor Hansen, Elizabeth Tandilashvili, Lauren S. Wakschlag, Elizabeth Norton, Daniel S. Pine, Melissa A. Brotman, Francisco Pereira

Infant crying can serve as a crucial indicator of various physiological and emotional states. This paper introduces a comprehensive approach detecting infant cries within audio data. We integrate Wav2Vec with traditional audio features and employ Gradient Boosting Machines for cry classification. We validate our approach on a real world dataset, demonstrating significant performance improvements over existing methods.

♻ ☆ Fair-Gate: Fairness-Aware Interpretable Risk Gating for Sex-Fair Voice Biometrics

Yangyang Qu, Massimiliano Todisco, Chiara Galdi, Nicholas Evans

Voice biometric systems can exhibit sex-related performance gaps even when overall verification accuracy is strong. We attribute these gaps to two practical mechanisms: (i) demographic shortcut learning, where speaker classification training exploits spurious correlations between sex and speaker identity, and (ii) feature entanglement, where sex-linked acoustic variation overlaps with identity cues and cannot be removed without degrading speaker discrimination. We propose Fair-Gate, a fairness-aware and interpretable risk-gating framework that addresses both mechanisms in a single pipeline. Fair-Gate applies risk extrapolation to reduce variation in speaker-classification risk across proxy sex groups, and introduces a local complementary gate that routes intermediate features into an identity branch and a sex branch. The gate provides interpretability by producing an explicit routing mask that can be inspected to understand which features are allocated to identity versus sex-related pathways. Experiments on VoxCeleb1 show that Fair-Gate improves the utility--fairness trade-off, yielding more sex-fair ASV performance under challenging evaluation conditions.

♻ ☆ DuoTok: Source-Aware Dual-Track Tokenization for Multi-Track Music Language Modeling

Rui Lin, Zhiyue Wu, Jiahe Le, Kangdi Wang, Weixiong Chen, Junyu Dai, Tao Jiang

Audio tokenization bridges continuous waveforms and multi-track music language models. In dual-track modeling, tokens should preserve three properties at once: high-fidelity reconstruction, strong predictability under a language model, and cross-track correspondence. We introduce DuoTok, a source-aware dual-track tokenizer that addresses this trade-off through staged disentanglement. DuoTok first pretrains a semantic encoder, then regularizes it with multi-task supervision, freezes the encoder, and applies hard dual-codebook routing while keeping auxiliary objectives on quantized codes. A diffusion decoder reconstructs high-frequency details, allowing tokens to focus on structured information for sequence modeling. On standard benchmarks, DuoTok achieves a favorable predictability-fidelity trade-off, reaching the lowest cnBPT while maintaining competitive reconstruction at 0.75 kbps. Under a held-constant dual-track language modeling protocol, enBPT also improves, indicating gains beyond codebook size effects. Controlled diagnostics show larger predictability costs under cross-track corruption and larger gains from longer context, suggesting that models trained on DuoTok tokens use cross-track structure and non-local history.

comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables. Project page: https://eps-acoustic-revolution-lab.github.io/DUO_TOK/

♻ ☆ CoDeTT: A Context-Aware Decision Benchmark for Turn-Taking Evaluation

Huan Shen, Yingao Wang, Shangkun Huang, Wei Zou, Yunzhang Chen

Turn-taking modeling is fundamental to spoken dialogue systems, yet its evaluation remains fragmented and often limited to binary boundary detection under narrow interaction settings. Such protocols hinder systematic comparison and obscure model weaknesses across conversational conditions. We present CoDeTT, a context-aware decision benchmark for turn-taking evaluation. CoDeTT formulates turn-taking as a structured decision problem and constructs a multi-scenario dataset with fine-grained decision categories and controlled context variations. Under a unified evaluation protocol, we assess representative existing models and observe substantial performance disparities across decision types and interaction scenarios. CoDeTT provides a standardized benchmark for systematic and context-aware evaluation of turn-taking systems. The benchmark dataset and evaluation toolkit are available at https://yingaowang-casia.github.io/CoDeTT.github.io/.

comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2026

♻ ☆ MATHDance: Mamba-Transformer Architecture with Uniform Tokenization for High-Quality 3D Dance Generation

Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang, Ziqiao Peng, Yuxuan Hu, Xiangyue Zhang, Puwei Wang, Hongyan Liu, Jun He, Zhaoxin Fan

Music-to-dance generation represents a challenging yet pivotal task at the intersection of choreography, virtual reality, and creative content generation. Despite its significance, existing methods face substantial limitation in achieving choreographic consistency. To address the challenge, we propose MatchDance, a novel framework for music-to-dance generation that constructs a latent representation to enhance choreographic consistency. MatchDance employs a two-stage design: (1) a Kinematic-Dynamic-based Quantization Stage (KDQS), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) with kinematic-dynamic constraints and reconstructs them with high fidelity, and (2) a Hybrid Music-to-Dance Generation Stage(HMDGS), which uses a Mamba-Transformer hybrid architecture to map music into the latent representation, followed by the KDQS decoder to generate 3D dance motions. Additionally, a music-dance retrieval framework and comprehensive metrics are introduced for evaluation. Extensive experiments on the FineDance dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

♻ ☆ Speaker Disentanglement of Speech Pre-trained Model Based on Interpretability

Xiaoxu Zhu, Junhua Li, Aaron J. Li, Guangchao Yao, Xiaojie Yu

Self-supervised speech models learn representations that capture both content and speaker information. Yet this entanglement creates problems: content tasks suffer from speaker bias, and privacy concerns arise when speaker identity leaks through supposedly anonymized representations. We present two contributions to address these challenges. First, we develop InterpTRQE-SptME (Timbre Residual Quantitative Evaluation Benchmark of Speech pre-training Models Encoding via Interpretability), a benchmark that directly measures residual speaker information in content embeddings using SHAP-based interpretability analysis. Unlike existing indirect metrics, our approach quantifies the exact proportion of speaker information remaining after disentanglement. Second, we propose InterpTF-SptME, which uses these interpretability insights to filter speaker information from embeddings. Testing on VCTK with seven models including HuBERT, WavLM, and ContentVec, we find that SHAP Noise filtering reduces speaker residuals from 18.05% to nearly zero while maintaining recognition accuracy (CTC loss increase under 1%). The method is model-agnostic and requires no retraining.

comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

☆ Diff-VS: Efficient Audio-Aware Diffusion U-Net for Vocals Separation ICASSP 2026

Yun-Ning, Hung, Richard Vogl, Filip Korzeniowski, Igor Pereira

While diffusion models are best known for their performance in generative tasks, they have also been successfully applied to many other tasks, including audio source separation. However, current generative approaches to music source separation often underperform on standard objective metrics. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a novel generative vocal separation model based on the Elucidated Diffusion Model (EDM) framework. Our model processes complex short-time Fourier transform spectrograms and employs an improved U-Net architecture based on music-informed design choices. Our approach matches discriminative baselines on objective metrics and achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art systems, as assessed by proxy subjective metrics. We hope these results encourage broader exploration of generative methods for music source separation

comment: Accepted at ICASSP 2026

☆ VisG AV-HuBERT: Viseme-Guided AV-HuBERT

Aristeidis Papadopoulos, Rishabh Jain, Naomi Harte

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) systems nowadays integrate Large Language Model (LLM) decoders with transformer-based encoders, achieving state-of-the-art results. However, the relative contributions of improved language modelling versus enhanced audiovisual encoding remain unclear. We propose Viseme-Guided AV-HuBERT (VisG AV-HuBERT), a multi-task fine-tuning framework that incorporates auxiliary viseme classification to strengthen the model's reliance on visual articulatory features. By extending AV-HuBERT with a lightweight viseme prediction sub-network, this method explicitly guides the encoder to preserve visual speech information. Evaluated on LRS3, VisG AV-HuBERT achieves comparable or improved performance over the baseline AV-HuBERT, with notable gains under heavy noise conditions. WER reduces from 13.59% to 6.60% (51.4% relative improvement) at -10 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for Speech noise. Deeper analysis reveals substantial reductions in substitution errors across noise types, demonstrating improved speech unit discrimination. Evaluation on LRS2 confirms generalization capability. Our results demonstrate that explicit viseme modelling enhances encoder representations, and provides a foundation for enhancing noise-robust AVSR through encoder-level improvements.

comment: Includes Supplementary Material. Accepted for Publication at International Conference on Pattern Recognition 2026 - ICPR 2026. Code is available at https://github.com/aristosp/visg_avhubert

☆ Description and Discussion on DCASE 2026 Challenge Task 4: Spatial Semantic Segmentation of Sound Scenes

Masahiro Yasuda, Binh Thien Nguyen, Noboru Harada, Romain Serizel, Mayank Mishra, Marc Delcroix, Carlos Hernandez-Olivan, Shoko Araki, Daiki Takeuchi, Tomohiro Nakatani, Nobutaka Ono

This paper presents an overview of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2026 Challenge Task 4, Spatial Semantic Segmentation of Sound Scenes (S5). The S5 task focuses on the joint detection and separation of sound events in complex spatial audio mixtures, contributing to the foundation of immersive communication. First introduced in DCASE 2025, the S5 task continues in DCASE 2026 Task 4 with key changes to better reflect real-world conditions, including allowing mixtures to contain multiple sources of the same class and to contain no target sources. In this paper, we describe task setting, along with the corresponding updates to the evaluation metrics and dataset. The experimental results of the submitted systems are also reported and analyzed. The official access point for data and code is https://github.com/nttcslab/dcase2026_task4_baseline.

☆ OmniVoice: Towards Omnilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Diffusion Language Models

Han Zhu, Lingxuan Ye, Wei Kang, Zengwei Yao, Liyong Guo, Fangjun Kuang, Zhifeng Han, Weiji Zhuang, Long Lin, Daniel Povey

We present OmniVoice, a massive multilingual zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) model that scales to over 600 languages. At its core is a novel diffusion language model-style discrete non-autoregressive (NAR) architecture. Unlike conventional discrete NAR models that suffer from performance bottlenecks in complex two-stage (text-to-semantic-to-acoustic) pipelines, OmniVoice directly maps text to multi-codebook acoustic tokens. This simplified approach is facilitated by two key technical innovations: (1) a full-codebook random masking strategy for efficient training, and (2) initialization from a pre-trained LLM to ensure superior intelligibility. By leveraging a 581k-hour multilingual dataset curated entirely from open-source data, OmniVoice achieves the broadest language coverage to date and delivers state-of-the-art performance across Chinese, English, and diverse multilingual benchmarks. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/k2-fsa/OmniVoice.

♻ ☆ Enhancing Infant Crying Detection with Gradient Boosting for Improved Emotional and Mental Health Diagnostics

Kyunghun Lee, Lauren M. Henry, Eleanor Hansen, Elizabeth Tandilashvili, Lauren S. Wakschlag, Elizabeth Norton, Daniel S. Pine, Melissa A. Brotman, Francisco Pereira

Infant crying can serve as a crucial indicator of various physiological and emotional states. This paper introduces a comprehensive approach detecting infant cries within audio data. We integrate Wav2Vec with traditional audio features and employ Gradient Boosting Machines for cry classification. We validate our approach on a real world dataset, demonstrating significant performance improvements over existing methods.

♻ ☆ Fair-Gate: Fairness-Aware Interpretable Risk Gating for Sex-Fair Voice Biometrics

Yangyang Qu, Massimiliano Todisco, Chiara Galdi, Nicholas Evans

Voice biometric systems can exhibit sex-related performance gaps even when overall verification accuracy is strong. We attribute these gaps to two practical mechanisms: (i) demographic shortcut learning, where speaker classification training exploits spurious correlations between sex and speaker identity, and (ii) feature entanglement, where sex-linked acoustic variation overlaps with identity cues and cannot be removed without degrading speaker discrimination. We propose Fair-Gate, a fairness-aware and interpretable risk-gating framework that addresses both mechanisms in a single pipeline. Fair-Gate applies risk extrapolation to reduce variation in speaker-classification risk across proxy sex groups, and introduces a local complementary gate that routes intermediate features into an identity branch and a sex branch. The gate provides interpretability by producing an explicit routing mask that can be inspected to understand which features are allocated to identity versus sex-related pathways. Experiments on VoxCeleb1 show that Fair-Gate improves the utility--fairness trade-off, yielding more sex-fair ASV performance under challenging evaluation conditions.

♻ ☆ Measuring Prosody Diversity in Zero-Shot TTS: A New Metric, Benchmark, and Exploration ICASSP 2026

Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Long Zhou, Wei Wang, Mingyu Cui, Xu Tan, Xie Chen

Prosody diversity is essential for achieving naturalness and expressiveness in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS). However, frequently used acoustic metrics capture only partial views of prosodic variation and correlate poorly with human perception, leaving the problem of reliably quantifying prosody diversity underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProsodyEval, a prosody diversity assessment dataset that provides Prosody Mean Opinion Score (PMOS) alongside conventional acoustic metrics. ProsodyEval comprises 1000 speech samples derived from 7 mainstream TTS systems, with 2000 human ratings. Building on this, we propose the Discretized Speech Weighted Edit Distance (DS-WED), a new objective diversity metric that quantifies prosodic variation via weighted edit distance over semantic tokens. Experiments on ProsodyEval show that DS-WED achieves substantially higher correlation with human judgments than existing acoustic metrics, while remaining highly robust in speech tokenization from HuBERT and WavLM. Leveraging DS-WED, we benchmark state-of-the-art open-source TTS systems on LibriSpeech test-clean and Seed-TTS test-en, and further explorations uncover several factors that influence prosody diversity, including generative modeling paradigms, duration control, and reinforcement learning. Moreover, we find that current large audio language models (LALMs) remain limited in capturing prosodic variations. Audio samples are available at https://prosodyeval.github.io.

comment: Accepted in ICASSP 2026

♻ ☆ MATHDance: Mamba-Transformer Architecture with Uniform Tokenization for High-Quality 3D Dance Generation

Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang, Ziqiao Peng, Yuxuan Hu, Xiangyue Zhang, Puwei Wang, Hongyan Liu, Jun He, Zhaoxin Fan

Music-to-dance generation represents a challenging yet pivotal task at the intersection of choreography, virtual reality, and creative content generation. Despite its significance, existing methods face substantial limitation in achieving choreographic consistency. To address the challenge, we propose MatchDance, a novel framework for music-to-dance generation that constructs a latent representation to enhance choreographic consistency. MatchDance employs a two-stage design: (1) a Kinematic-Dynamic-based Quantization Stage (KDQS), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) with kinematic-dynamic constraints and reconstructs them with high fidelity, and (2) a Hybrid Music-to-Dance Generation Stage(HMDGS), which uses a Mamba-Transformer hybrid architecture to map music into the latent representation, followed by the KDQS decoder to generate 3D dance motions. Additionally, a music-dance retrieval framework and comprehensive metrics are introduced for evaluation. Extensive experiments on the FineDance dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

♻ ☆ How Open is Open TTS? A Practical Evaluation of Open Source TTS Tools

Teodora Răgman, Adrian Bogdan Stânea, Horia Cucu, Adriana Stan

Open-source text-to-speech (TTS) frameworks have emerged as highly adaptable platforms for developing speech synthesis systems across a wide range of languages. However, their applicability is not uniform -- particularly when the target language is under-resourced or when computational resources are constrained. In this study, we systematically assess the feasibility of building novel TTS models using four widely adopted open-source architectures: FastPitch, VITS, Grad-TTS, and Matcha-TTS. Our evaluation spans multiple dimensions, including qualitative aspects such as ease of installation, dataset preparation, and hardware requirements, as well as quantitative assessments of synthesis quality for Romanian. We employ both objective metrics and subjective listening tests to evaluate intelligibility, speaker similarity, and naturalness of the generated speech. The results reveal significant challenges in tool chain setup, data preprocessing, and computational efficiency, which can hinder adoption in low-resource contexts. By grounding the analysis in reproducible protocols and accessible evaluation criteria, this work aims to inform best practices and promote more inclusive, language-diverse TTS development. All information needed to reproduce this study (i.e. code and data) are available in our git repository: https://gitlab.com/opentts_ragman/OpenTTS

comment: Published in IEEE Access https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11269795

♻ ☆ Speaker Disentanglement of Speech Pre-trained Model Based on Interpretability

Xiaoxu Zhu, Junhua Li, Aaron J. Li, Guangchao Yao, Xiaojie Yu

Self-supervised speech models learn representations that capture both content and speaker information. Yet this entanglement creates problems: content tasks suffer from speaker bias, and privacy concerns arise when speaker identity leaks through supposedly anonymized representations. We present two contributions to address these challenges. First, we develop InterpTRQE-SptME (Timbre Residual Quantitative Evaluation Benchmark of Speech pre-training Models Encoding via Interpretability), a benchmark that directly measures residual speaker information in content embeddings using SHAP-based interpretability analysis. Unlike existing indirect metrics, our approach quantifies the exact proportion of speaker information remaining after disentanglement. Second, we propose InterpTF-SptME, which uses these interpretability insights to filter speaker information from embeddings. Testing on VCTK with seven models including HuBERT, WavLM, and ContentVec, we find that SHAP Noise filtering reduces speaker residuals from 18.05% to nearly zero while maintaining recognition accuracy (CTC loss increase under 1%). The method is model-agnostic and requires no retraining.

comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

♻ ☆ Robust Residual Finite Scalar Quantization for Neural Compression

Xiaoxu Zhu, Xiaojie Yu, Guangchao Yao, Yiming Ren, Baoxiang Li

Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) offers simplified training but suffers from residual magnitude decay in multi-stage settings, where subsequent stages receive exponentially weaker signals. We propose Robust Residual Finite Scalar Quantization (RFSQ), addressing this fundamental limitation through two novel conditioning strategies: learnable scaling factors and invertible layer normalization. Our experiments across audio and image modalities demonstrate RFSQ's effectiveness and generalizability. In audio reconstruction at 24 bits/frame, RFSQ-LayerNorm achieves 3.646 DNSMOS, a 3.6% improvement over state-of-the-art RVQ (3.518). On ImageNet, RFSQ achieves 0.102 L1 loss and 0.100 perceptual loss, with LayerNorm providing 9.7% L1 improvement and 17.4% perceptual improvement over unconditioned variants. The LayerNorm strategy consistently outperforms alternatives by maintaining normalized input statistics across stages, effectively preventing exponential magnitude decay that limits naive residual approaches. RFSQ combines FSQ's simplicity with multi-stage quantization's representational power, establishing a new standard for neural compression across diverse modalities.

comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

☆ HippoCamp: Benchmarking Contextual Agents on Personal Computers

Zhe Yang, Shulin Tian, Kairui Hu, Shuai Liu, Hoang-Nhat Nguyen, Yichi Zhang, Zujin Guo, Mengying Yu, Zinan Zhang, Jingkang Yang, Chen Change Loy, Ziwei Liu

We present HippoCamp, a new benchmark designed to evaluate agents' capabilities on multimodal file management. Unlike existing agent benchmarks that focus on tasks like web interaction, tool use, or software automation in generic settings, HippoCamp evaluates agents in user-centric environments to model individual user profiles and search massive personal files for context-aware reasoning. Our benchmark instantiates device-scale file systems over real-world profiles spanning diverse modalities, comprising 42.4 GB of data across over 2K real-world files. Building upon the raw files, we construct 581 QA pairs to assess agents' capabilities in search, evidence perception, and multi-step reasoning. To facilitate fine-grained analysis, we provide 46.1K densely annotated structured trajectories for step-wise failure diagnosis. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and agentic methods on HippoCamp. Our comprehensive experiments reveal a significant performance gap: even the most advanced commercial models achieve only 48.3% accuracy in user profiling, struggling particularly with long-horizon retrieval and cross-modal reasoning within dense personal file systems. Furthermore, our step-wise failure diagnosis identifies multimodal perception and evidence grounding as the primary bottlenecks. Ultimately, HippoCamp exposes the critical limitations of current agents in realistic, user-centric environments and provides a robust foundation for developing next-generation personal AI assistants.

comment: Project Page: https://hippocamp-ai.github.io/

☆ LAtent Phase Inference from Short time sequences using SHallow REcurrent Decoders (LAPIS-SHRED)

Yuxuan Bao, Xingyue Zhang, J. Nathan Kutz

Reconstructing full spatio-temporal dynamics from sparse observations in both space and time remains a central challenge in complex systems, as measurements can be spatially incomplete and can be also limited to narrow temporal windows. Yet approximating the complete spatio-temporal trajectory is essential for mechanistic insight and understanding, model calibration, and operational decision-making. We introduce LAPIS-SHRED (LAtent Phase Inference from Short time sequence using SHallow REcurrent Decoders), a modular architecture that reconstructs and/or forecasts complete spatiotemporal dynamics from sparse sensor observations confined to short temporal windows. LAPIS-SHRED operates through a three-stage pipeline: (i) a SHRED model is pre-trained entirely on simulation data to map sensor time-histories into a structured latent space, (ii) a temporal sequence model, trained on simulation-derived latent trajectories, learns to propagate latent states forward or backward in time to span unobserved temporal regions from short observational time windows, and (iii) at deployment, only a short observation window of hyper-sparse sensor measurements from the true system is provided, from which the frozen SHRED model and the temporal model jointly reconstruct or forecast the complete spatiotemporal trajectory. The framework supports bidirectional inference, inherits data assimilation and multiscale reconstruction capabilities from its modular structure, and accommodates extreme observational constraints including single-frame terminal inputs. We evaluate LAPIS-SHRED on six experiments spanning complex spatio-temporal physics: turbulent flows, multiscale propulsion physics, volatile combustion transients, and satellite-derived environmental fields, highlighting a lightweight, modular architecture suited for operational settings where observation is constrained by physical or logistical limitations.

☆ TRACE: High-Fidelity 3D Scene Editing via Tangible Reconstruction and Geometry-Aligned Contextual Video Masking

Jiyuan Hu, Zechuan Zhang, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang

We present TRACE, a mesh-guided 3DGS editing framework that achieves automated, high-fidelity scene transformation. By anchoring video diffusion with explicit 3D geometry, TRACE uniquely enables fine-grained, part-level manipulatio--such as local pose shifting or component replacemen--while preserving the structural integrity of the central subject, a capability largely absent in existing editing methods. Our approach comprises three key stages: (1) Multi-view 3D-Anchor Synthesis, which leverages a sparse-view editor trained on our MV-TRACE datase--the first multi-view consistent dataset dedicated to scene-coherent object addition and modificatio--to generate spatially consistent 3D-anchors; (2) Tangible Geometry Anchoring (TGA), which ensures precise spatial synchronization between inserted meshes and the 3DGS scene via two-phase registration; and (3) Contextual Video Masking (CVM), which integrates 3D projections into an autoregressive video pipeline to achieve temporally stable, physically-grounded rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TRACE consistently outperforms existing methods especially in editing versatility and structural integrity.

comment: 22 pages, 9 figures

☆ Neural Harmonic Textures for High-Quality Primitive Based Neural Reconstruction

Jorge Condor, Nicolas Moenne-Loccoz, Merlin Nimier-David, Piotr Didyk, Zan Gojcic, Qi Wu

Primitive-based methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have recently become the state-of-the-art for novel-view synthesis and related reconstruction tasks. Compared to neural fields, these representations are more flexible, adaptive, and scale better to large scenes. However, the limited expressivity of individual primitives makes modeling high-frequency detail challenging. We introduce Neural Harmonic Textures, a neural representation approach that anchors latent feature vectors on a virtual scaffold surrounding each primitive. These features are interpolated within the primitive at ray intersection points. Inspired by Fourier analysis, we apply periodic activations to the interpolated features, turning alpha blending into a weighted sum of harmonic components. The resulting signal is then decoded in a single deferred pass using a small neural network, significantly reducing computational cost. Neural Harmonic Textures yield state-of-the-art results in real-time novel view synthesis while bridging the gap between primitive- and neural-field-based reconstruction. Our method integrates seamlessly into existing primitive-based pipelines such as 3DGUT, Triangle Splatting, and 2DGS. We further demonstrate its generality with applications to 2D image fitting and semantic reconstruction.

☆ True (VIS) Lies: Analyzing How Generative AI Recognizes Intentionality, Rhetoric, and Misleadingness in Visualization Lies

Graziano Blasilli, Marco Angelini

This study investigates the ability of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and interpret misleading visualizations, and recognize these observations along with their underlying causes and potential intentionality. Our analysis leverages concepts from visualization rhetoric and a newly developed taxonomy of authorial intents as explanatory lenses. We formulated three research questions and addressed them experimentally using a dataset of 2,336 COVID-19-related tweets, half of which contain misleading visualizations, and supplemented it with real-world examples of perceptual, cognitive, and conceptual errors drawn from VisLies, the IEEE VIS community event dedicated to showcasing deceptive and misleading visualizations. To ensure broad coverage of the current LLM landscape, we evaluated 16 state-of-the-art models. Among them, 15 are open-weight models, spanning a wide range of model sizes, architectural families, and reasoning capabilities. The selection comprises small models, namely Nemotron-Nano-V2-VL (12B parameters), Mistral-Small-3.2 (24B), DeepSeek-VL2 (27B), Gemma3 (27B), and GTA1 (32B); medium-sized models, namely Qianfan-VL (70B), Molmo (72B), GLM-4.5V (108B), LLaVA-NeXT (110B), and Pixtral-Large (124B); and large models, namely Qwen3-VL (235B), InternVL3.5 (241B), Step3 (321B), Llama-4-Maverick (400B), and Kimi-K2.5 (1000B). In addition, we employed OpenAI GPT-5.4, a frontier proprietary model. To establish a human perspective on these tasks, we also conducted a user study with visualization experts to assess how people perceive rhetorical techniques and the authorial intentions behind the same misleading visualizations. This allows comparison between model and expert behavior, revealing similarities and differences that provide insights into where LLMs align with human judgment and where they diverge.

☆ A ROS 2 Wrapper for Florence-2: Multi-Mode Local Vision-Language Inference for Robotic Systems

J. E. Domínguez-Vidal

Foundation vision-language models are becoming increasingly relevant to robotics because they can provide richer semantic perception than narrow task-specific pipelines. However, their practical adoption in robot software stacks still depends on reproducible middleware integrations rather than on model quality alone. Florence-2 is especially attractive in this regard because it unifies captioning, optical character recognition, open-vocabulary detection, grounding and related vision-language tasks within a comparatively manageable model size. This article presents a ROS 2 wrapper for Florence-2 that exposes the model through three complementary interaction modes: continuous topic-driven processing, synchronous service calls and asynchronous actions. The wrapper is designed for local execution and supports both native installation and Docker container deployment. It also combines generic JSON outputs with standard ROS 2 message bindings for detection-oriented tasks. A functional validation is reported together with a throughput study on several GPUs, showing that local deployment is feasible with consumer grade hardware. The repository is publicly available here: https://github.com/JEDominguezVidal/florence2_ros2_wrapper

comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

☆ Open-Set Supervised 3D Anomaly Detection: An Industrial Dataset and a Generalisable Framework for Unknown Defects

Hanzhe Liang, Luocheng Zhang, Junyang Xia, HanLiang Zhou, Bingyang Guo, Yingxi Xie, Can Gao, Ruiyun Yu, Jinbao Wang, Pan Li

Although self-supervised 3D anomaly detection assumes that acquiring high-precision point clouds is computationally expensive, in real manufacturing scenarios it is often feasible to collect a limited number of anomalous samples. Therefore, we study open-set supervised 3D anomaly detection, where the model is trained with only normal samples and a small number of known anomalous samples, aiming to identify unknown anomalies at test time. We present Open-Industry, a high-quality industrial dataset containing 15 categories, each with five real anomaly types collected from production lines. We first adapt general open-set anomaly detection methods to accommodate 3D point cloud inputs better. Building upon this, we propose Open3D-AD, a point-cloud-oriented approach that leverages normal samples, simulated anomalies, and partially observed real anomalies to model the probability density distributions of normal and anomalous data. Then, we introduce a simple Correspondence Distributions Subsampling to reduce the overlap between normal and non-normal distributions, enabling stronger dual distributions modeling. Based on these contributions, we establish a comprehensive benchmark and evaluate the proposed method extensively on Open-Industry as well as established datasets including Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet. Benchmark results and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Open3D-AD and further reveal the potential of open-set supervised 3D anomaly detection.

comment: Resources: https://github.com/hzzzzzhappy/open-industry

☆ AdaLoRA-QAT: Adaptive Low-Rank and Quantization-Aware Segmentation

Prantik Deb, Srimanth Dhondy, N. Ramakrishna, Anu Kapoor, Raju S. Bapi, Tapabrata Chakraborti

Chest X-ray (CXR) segmentation is an important step in computer-aided diagnosis, yet deploying large foundation models in clinical settings remains challenging due to computational constraints. We propose AdaLoRA-QAT, a two-stage fine-tuning framework that combines adaptive low-rank encoder adaptation with full quantization-aware training. Adaptive rank allocation improves parameter efficiency, while selective mixed-precision INT8 quantization preserves structural fidelity crucial for clinical reliability. Evaluated across large-scale CXR datasets, AdaLoRA-QAT achieves 95.6% Dice, matching full-precision SAM decoder fine-tuning while reducing trainable parameters by 16.6\times and yielding 2.24\times model compression. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test confirms that quantization does not significantly degrade segmentation accuracy. These results demonstrate that AdaLoRA-QAT effectively balances accuracy, efficiency, and structural trust-worthiness, enabling compact and deployable foundation models for medical image segmentation. Code and pretrained models are available at: https://prantik-pdeb.github.io/adaloraqat.github.io/

comment: Accepted to ISBI 2026(Oral Presentation)

☆ Looking into a Pixel by Nonlinear Unmixing -- A Generative Approach

Maofeng Tang, Hairong Qi

Due to the large footprint of pixels in remote sensing imagery, hyperspectral unmixing (HU) has become an important and necessary procedure in hyperspectral image analysis. Traditional HU methods rely on a prior spectral mixing model, especially for nonlinear mixtures, which has largely limited the performance and generalization capacity of the unmixing approach. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of hyperspectral nonlinear unmixing (HNU) without explicit knowledge of the mixing model. Inspired by the principle of generative models, where images of the same distribution can be generated as that of the training images without knowing the exact probability distribution function of the image, we develop an invertible mixing-unmixing process via a bi-directional GAN framework, constrained by both the cycle consistency and the linkage between linear and nonlinear mixtures. The combination of cycle consistency and linear linkage provides powerful constraints without requiring an explicit mixing model. We refer to the proposed approach as the linearly-constrained CycleGAN unmixing net, or LCGU net. Experimental results indicate that the proposed LCGU net exhibits stable and competitive performance across different datasets compared with other state-of-the-art model-based HNU methods.

☆ Toward Personalized Darts Training: A Data-Driven Framework Based on Skeleton-Based Biomechanical Analysis and Motion Modeling

Zhantao Chen, Dongyi He, Jin Fang, Xi Chen, Yisuo Liu, Xiaozhen Zhong, Xuejun Hu

As sports training becomes more data-driven, traditional dart coaching based mainly on experience and visual observation is increasingly inadequate for high-precision, goal-oriented movements. Although prior studies have highlighted the importance of release parameters, joint motion, and coordination in dart throwing, most quantitative methods still focus on local variables, single-release metrics, or static template matching. These approaches offer limited support for personalized training and often overlook useful movement variability. This paper presents a data-driven dart training assistance system. The system creates a closed-loop framework spanning motion capture, feature modeling, and personalized feedback. Dart-throwing data were collected in markerless conditions using a Kinect 2.0 depth sensor and an optical camera. Eighteen kinematic features were extracted from four biomechanical dimensions: three-link coordination, release velocity, multi-joint angular configuration, and postural stability. Two modules were developed: a personalized optimal throwing trajectory model that combines historical high-quality samples with the minimum jerk criterion, and a motion deviation diagnosis and recommendation model based on z-scores and hierarchical logic. A total of 2,396 throwing samples from professional and non-professional athletes were collected. Results show that the system generates smooth personalized reference trajectories consistent with natural human movement. Case studies indicate that it can detect poor trunk stability, abnormal elbow displacement, and imbalanced velocity control, then provide targeted recommendations. The framework shifts dart evaluation from deviation from a uniform standard to deviation from an individual's optimal control range, improving personalization and interpretability for darts training and other high-precision target sports.

☆ ReinDriveGen: Reinforcement Post-Training for Out-of-Distribution Driving Scene Generation

Hao Zhang, Lue Fan, Weikang Bian, Zehuan Wu, Lewei Lu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Hongsheng Li

We present ReinDriveGen, a framework that enables full controllability over dynamic driving scenes, allowing users to freely edit actor trajectories to simulate safety-critical corner cases such as front-vehicle collisions, drifting cars, vehicles spinning out of control, pedestrians jaywalking, and cyclists cutting across lanes. Our approach constructs a dynamic 3D point cloud scene from multi-frame LiDAR data, introduces a vehicle completion module to reconstruct full 360° geometry from partial observations, and renders the edited scene into 2D condition images that guide a video diffusion model to synthesize realistic driving videos. Since such edited scenarios inevitably fall outside the training distribution, we further propose an RL-based post-training strategy with a pairwise preference model and a pairwise reward mechanism, enabling robust quality improvement under out-of-distribution conditions without ground-truth supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReinDriveGen outperforms existing approaches on edited driving scenarios and achieves state-of-the-art results on novel ego viewpoint synthesis.

comment: Project page: https://drive-sim.github.io/ReinDriveGen/

☆ Lightweight Prompt-Guided CLIP Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation

Reyhaneh Ahani Manghotay, Jie Liang

Leveraging the rich semantic features of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP for monocular depth estimation tasks is a promising direction, yet often requires extensive fine-tuning or lacks geometric precision. We present a parameter-efficient framework, named MoA-DepthCLIP, that adapts pretrained CLIP representations for monocular depth estimation with minimal supervision. Our method integrates a lightweight Mixture-of-Adapters (MoA) module into the pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT-B/32) backbone combined with selective fine-tuning of the final layers. This design enables spatially-aware adaptation, guided by a global semantic context vector and a hybrid prediction architecture that synergizes depth bin classification with direct regression. To enhance structural accuracy, we employ a composite loss function that enforces geometric constraints. On the NYU Depth V2 benchmark, MoA-DepthCLIP achieves competitive results, significantly outperforming the DepthCLIP baseline by improving the $δ_1$ accuracy from 0.390 to 0.745 and reducing the RMSE from 1.176 to 0.520. These results are achieved while requiring substantially few trainable parameters, demonstrating that lightweight, prompt-guided MoA is a highly effective strategy for transferring VLM knowledge to fine-grained monocular depth estimation tasks.

comment: 14 pages, 2 figures

☆ ProTPS: Prototype-Guided Text Prompt Selection for Continual Learning

Jie Mei, Li-Leng Peng, Keith Fuller, Jenq-Neng Hwang

For continual learning, text-prompt-based methods leverage text encoders and learnable prompts to encode semantic features for sequentially arrived classes over time. A common challenge encountered by existing works is how to learn unique text prompts, which implicitly carry semantic information of new classes, so that the semantic features of newly arrived classes do not overlap with those of trained classes, thereby mitigating the catastrophic forgetting problem. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach Prototype-guided Text Prompt Selection (ProTPS)'' to intentionally increase the training flexibility thus encouraging the learning of unique text prompts. Specifically, our ProTPS learns class-specific vision prototypes and text prompts. Vision prototypes guide the selection and learning of text prompts for each class. We first evaluate our ProTPS in both class incremental (CI) setting and cross-datasets continual (CDC) learning setting. Because our ProTPS achieves performance close to the upper bounds, we further collect a real-world dataset with 112 marine species collected over a span of six years, named Marine112, to bring new challenges to the community. Marine112 is authentically suited for the class and domain incremental (CDI) learning setting and is under natural long-tail distribution. The results under three settings show that our ProTPS performs favorably against the recent state-of-the-art methods. The implementation code and Marine112 dataset will be released upon the acceptance of our paper.

☆ TRACE: Training-Free Partial Audio Deepfake Detection via Embedding Trajectory Analysis of Speech Foundation Models

Awais Khan, Muhammad Umar Farooq, Kutub Uddin, Khalid Malik

Partial audio deepfakes, where synthesized segments are spliced into genuine recordings, are particularly deceptive because most of the audio remains authentic. Existing detectors are supervised: they require frame-level annotations, overfit to specific synthesis pipelines, and must be retrained as new generative models emerge. We argue that this supervision is unnecessary. We hypothesize that speech foundation models implicitly encode a forensic signal: genuine speech forms smooth, slowly varying embedding trajectories, while splice boundaries introduce abrupt disruptions in frame-level transitions. Building on this, we propose TRACE (Training-free Representation-based Audio Countermeasure via Embedding dynamics), a training-free framework that detects partial audio deepfakes by analyzing the first-order dynamics of frozen speech foundation model representations without any training, labeled data, or architectural modification. We evaluate TRACE on four benchmarks that span two languages using six speech foundation models. In PartialSpoof, TRACE achieves 8.08% EER, competitive with fine-tuned supervised baselines. In LlamaPartialSpoof, the most challenging benchmark featuring LLM-driven commercial synthesis, TRACE surpasses a supervised baseline outright (24.12% vs. 24.49% EER) without any target-domain data. These results show that temporal dynamics in speech foundation models provide an effective, generalize signal for training-free audio forensics.

☆ ReMoGen: Real-time Human Interaction-to-Reaction Generation via Modular Learning from Diverse Data CVPR 2026

Yaoqin Ye, Yiteng Xu, Qin Sun, Xinge Zhu, Yujing Sun, Yuexin Ma

Human behaviors in real-world environments are inherently interactive, with an individual's motion shaped by surrounding agents and the scene. Such capabilities are essential for applications in virtual avatars, interactive animation, and human-robot collaboration. We target real-time human interaction-to-reaction generation, which generates the ego's future motion from dynamic multi-source cues, including others' actions, scene geometry, and optional high-level semantic inputs. This task is fundamentally challenging due to (i) limited and fragmented interaction data distributed across heterogeneous single-person, human-human, and human-scene domains, and (ii) the need to produce low-latency yet high-fidelity motion responses during continuous online interaction. To address these challenges, we propose ReMoGen (Reaction Motion Generation), a modular learning framework for real-time interaction-to-reaction generation. ReMoGen leverages a universal motion prior learned from large-scale single-person motion datasets and adapts it to target interaction domains through independently trained Meta-Interaction modules, enabling robust generalization under data-scarce and heterogeneous supervision. To support responsive online interaction, ReMoGen performs segment-level generation together with a lightweight Frame-wise Segment Refinement module that incorporates newly observed cues at the frame level, improving both responsiveness and temporal coherence without expensive full-sequence inference. Extensive experiments across human-human, human-scene, and mixed-modality interaction settings show that ReMoGen produces high-quality, coherent, and responsive reactions, while generalizing effectively across diverse interaction scenarios.

comment: accepted by CVPR 2026, project page: https://4dvlab.github.io/project_page/remogen/

☆ ProOOD: Prototype-Guided Out-of-Distribution 3D Occupancy Prediction CVPR 2026

Yuheng Zhang, Mengfei Duan, Kunyu Peng, Yuhang Wang, Di Wen, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Kailun Yang

3D semantic occupancy prediction is central to autonomous driving, yet current methods are vulnerable to long-tailed class bias and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, often overconfidently assigning anomalies to rare classes. We present ProOOD, a lightweight, plug-and-play method that couples prototype-guided refinement with training-free OOD scoring. ProOOD comprises (i) prototype-guided semantic imputation that fills occluded regions with class-consistent features, (ii) prototype-guided tail mining that strengthens rare-class representations to curb OOD absorption, and (iii) EchoOOD, which fuses local logit coherence with local and global prototype matching to produce reliable voxel-level OOD scores. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that ProOOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution 3D occupancy prediction and OOD detection. On SemanticKITTI, it surpasses baselines by +3.57% mIoU overall and +24.80% tail-class mIoU; on VAA-KITTI, it improves AuPRCr by +19.34 points, with consistent gains across benchmarks. These improvements yield more calibrated occupancy estimates and more reliable OOD detection in safety-critical urban driving. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/7uHeng/ProOOD.

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/7uHeng/ProOOD

☆ PHASOR: Anatomy- and Phase-Consistent Volumetric Diffusion for CT Virtual Contrast Enhancement

Zilong Li, Dongyang Li, Chenglong Ma, Zhan Feng, Dakai Jin, Junping Zhang, Hao Luo, Fan Wang, Hongming Shan

Contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CECT) is pivotal for highlighting tissue perfusion and vascularity, yet its clinical ubiquity is impeded by the invasive nature of contrast agents and radiation risks. While virtual contrast enhancement (VCE) offers an alternative to synthesizing CECT from non-contrast CT (NCCT), existing methods struggle with anatomical heterogeneity and spatial misalignment, leading to inconsistent enhancement patterns and incorrect details. This paper introduces PHASOR, a volumetric diffusion framework for high-fidelity CT VCE. By treating CT volumes as coherent sequences, we leverage a video diffusion model to enhance structural coherence and volumetric accuracy. To ensure anatomy-phase consistent synthesis, we introduce two complementary modules. First, anatomy-routed mixture-of-experts (AR-MoE) anchors distinct enhancement patterns to anatomical semantics, with organ-specific memory to capture salient details. Second, intensity-phase aware representation alignment (IP-REPA) highlights intricate contrast signals while mitigating the impact of imperfect spatial alignment. Extensive experiments across three datasets demonstrate that PHASOR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both synthesis quality and enhancement accuracy.

☆ A global dataset of continuous urban dashcam driving

Md Shadab Alam, Olena Bazilinska, Pavlo Bazilinskyy

We introduce CROWD (City Road Observations With Dashcams), a manually curated dataset of ordinary, minute scale, temporally contiguous, unedited, front facing urban dashcam segments screened and segmented from publicly available YouTube videos. CROWD is designed to support cross-domain robustness and interaction analysis by prioritising routine driving and explicitly excluding crashes, crash aftermath, and other edited or incident-focused content. The release contains 51,753 segment records spanning 20,275.56 hours (42,032 videos), covering 7,103 named inhabited places in 238 countries and territories across all six inhabited continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania), with segment level manual labels for time of day (day or night) and vehicle type. To lower the barrier for benchmarking, we provide per-segment CSV files of machine-generated detections for all 80 MS-COCO classes produced with YOLOv11x, together with segment-local multi-object tracks (BoT-SORT); e.g. person, bicycle, motorcycle, car, bus, truck, traffic light, stop sign, etc. CROWD is distributed as video identifiers with segment boundaries and derived annotations, enabling reproducible research without redistributing the underlying videos.

☆ ONE-SHOT: Compositional Human-Environment Video Synthesis via Spatial-Decoupled Motion Injection and Hybrid Context Integration

Fengyuan Yang, Luying Huang, Jiazhi Guan, Quanwei Yang, Dongwei Pan, Jianglin Fu, Haocheng Feng, Wei He, Kaisiyuan Wang, Hang Zhou, Angela Yao

Recent advances in Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have revolutionized human-centric video synthesis, yet fine-grained and independent editing of subjects and scenes remains a critical challenge. Recent attempts to incorporate richer environment control through rigid 3D geometric compositions often encounter a stark trade-off between precise control and generative flexibility. Furthermore, the heavy 3D pre-processing still limits practical scalability. In this paper, we propose ONE-SHOT, a parameter-efficient framework for compositional human-environment video generation. Our key insight is to factorize the generative process into disentangled signals. Specifically, we introduce a canonical-space injection mechanism that decouples human dynamics from environmental cues via cross-attention. We also propose Dynamic-Grounded-RoPE, a novel positional embedding strategy that establishes spatial correspondences between disparate spatial domains without any heuristic 3D alignments. To support long-horizon synthesis, we introduce a Hybrid Context Integration mechanism to maintain subject and scene consistency across minute-level generations. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering superior structural control and creative diversity for video synthesis. Our project has been available on: https://martayang.github.io/ONE-SHOT/.

comment: 23 pages, 7 figures

☆ Foundation Model-guided Iteratively Prompting and Pseudo-Labeling for Partially Labeled Medical Image Segmentation

Qiaochu Zhao, Wei Wei, David Horowitz, Richard Bakst, Yading Yuan

Automated medical image segmentation has achieved remarkable progress with fully labeled data. However, site-specific clinical priorities and the high cost of manual annotation often yield scans with only a subset of organs labeled, leading to the partially labeled problem that degrades performance. To address this issue, we propose IPnP, an Iteratively Prompting and Pseudo-labeling framework, for partially labeled medical image segmentation. IPnP iteratively generates and refines pseudo-labels for unlabeled organs through collaboration between a trainable segmentation network (specialist) and a frozen foundation model (generalist), progressively recovering full-organ supervision. On the public dataset AMOS with the simulated partial-label setting, IPnP consistently improves segmentation performance over prior methods and approaches the performance of the fully labeled reference. We further evaluate on a private, partially labeled dataset of 210 head-and-neck cancer patients and demonstrate our effectiveness in real-world clinical settings.

comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for presentation at IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2026

☆ Sub-metre Lunar DEM Generation and Validation from Chandrayaan-2 OHRC Multi-View Imagery Using Open-Source Photogrammetry

Aaranay Aadi, Jai Singla, Nitant Dube, Oleg Alexandrov

High-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) of the lunar surface are essential for surface mobility planning, landing site characterization, and planetary science. The Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) on board Chandrayaan-2 has the best ground sampling capabilities of any lunar orbital imaging currently in use by acquiring panchromatic imagery at a resolution of roughly 20-30 cm per pixel. This work presents, for the first time, the generation of sub-metre DEMs from OHRC multi-view imagery using an exclusively open-source pipeline. Candidate stereo pairs are identified from non-paired OHRC archives through geometric analysis of image metadata, employing baseline-to-height (B/H) ratio computation and convergence angle estimation. Dense stereo correspondence and ray triangulation are then applied to generate point clouds, which are gridded into DEMs at effective spatial resolutions between approximately 24 and 54 cm across five geographically distributed lunar sites. Absolute elevation consistency is established through Iterative Closest Point (ICP) alignment against Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) Digital Terrain Models, followed by constant-bias offset correction. Validation against NAC reference terrain yields a vertical RMSE of 5.85 m (at native OHRC resolution), and a horizontal accuracy of less than 30 cm assessed by planimetric feature matching.

comment: 17 pages, 8 figures

☆ Diff3R: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Uncertainty-aware Differentiable Optimization

Yueh-Cheng Liu, Jozef Hladký, Matthias Nießner, Angela Dai

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) present two main directions: feed-forward models offer fast inference in sparse-view settings, while per-scene optimization yields high-quality renderings but is computationally expensive. To combine the benefits of both, we introduce Diff3R, a novel framework that explicitly bridges feed-forward prediction and test-time optimization. By incorporating a differentiable 3DGS optimization layer directly into the training loop, our network learns to predict an optimal initialization for test-time optimization rather than a conventional zero-shot result. To overcome the computational cost of backpropagating through the optimization steps, we propose computing gradients via the Implicit Function Theorem and a scalable, matrix-free PCG solver tailored for 3DGS optimization. Additionally, we incorporate a data-driven uncertainty model into the optimization process by adaptively controlling how much the parameters are allowed to change during optimization. This approach effectively mitigates overfitting in under-constrained regions and increases robustness against input outliers. Since our proposed optimization layer is model-agnostic, we show that it can be seamlessly integrated into existing feed-forward 3DGS architectures for both pose-given and pose-free methods, providing improvements for test-time optimization.

comment: Project page: https://liu115.github.io/diff3r, Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxzNSAdUY70

☆ Forecasting Motion in the Wild

Neerja Thakkar, Shiry Ginosar, Jacob Walker, Jitendra Malik, Joao Carreira, Carl Doersch

Visual intelligence requires anticipating the future behavior of agents, yet vision systems lack a general representation for motion and behavior. We propose dense point trajectories as visual tokens for behavior, a structured mid-level representation that disentangles motion from appearance and generalizes across diverse non-rigid agents, such as animals in-the-wild. Building on this abstraction, we design a diffusion transformer that models unordered sets of trajectories and explicitly reasons about occlusion, enabling coherent forecasts of complex motion patterns. To evaluate at scale, we curate 300 hours of unconstrained animal video with robust shot detection and camera-motion compensation. Experiments show that forecasting trajectory tokens achieves category-agnostic, data-efficient prediction, outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and generalizes to rare species and morphologies, providing a foundation for predictive visual intelligence in the wild.

comment: project page: https://motion-forecasting.github.io/

☆ AutoMIA: Improved Baselines for Membership Inference Attack via Agentic Self-Exploration

Ruhao Liu, Weiqi Huang, Qi Li, Xinchao Wang

Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) serve as a fundamental auditing tool for evaluating training data leakage in machine learning models. However, existing methodologies predominantly rely on static, handcrafted heuristics that lack adaptability, often leading to suboptimal performance when transferred across different large models. In this work, we propose AutoMIA, an agentic framework that reformulates membership inference as an automated process of self-exploration and strategy evolution. Given high-level scenario specifications, AutoMIA self-explores the attack space by generating executable logits-level strategies and progressively refining them through closed-loop evaluation feedback. By decoupling abstract strategy reasoning from low-level execution, our framework enables a systematic, model-agnostic traversal of the attack search space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoMIA consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while eliminating the need for manual feature engineering.

☆ PDA: Text-Augmented Defense Framework for Robust Vision-Language Models against Adversarial Image Attacks

Jingning Xu, Haochen Luo, Chen Liu

Vision-language models (VLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial image perturbations. Existing works based on adversarial training against task-specific adversarial examples are computationally expensive and often fail to generalize to unseen attack types. To address these limitations, we introduce Paraphrase-Decomposition-Aggregation (PDA), a training-free defense framework that leverages text augmentation to enhance VLM robustness under diverse adversarial image attacks. PDA performs prompt paraphrasing, question decomposition, and consistency aggregation entirely at test time, thus requiring no modification on the underlying models. To balance robustness and efficiency, we instantiate PDA as invariants that reduce the inference cost while retaining most of its robustness gains. Experiments on multiple VLM architectures and benchmarks for visual question answering, classification, and captioning show that PDA achieves consistent robustness gains against various adversarial perturbations while maintaining competitive clean accuracy, establishing a generic, strong and practical defense framework for VLMs during inference.

☆ Query-Conditioned Evidential Keyframe Sampling for MLLM-Based Long-Form Video Understanding

Yiheng Wang, Lichen Zhu, Yueqian Lin, Yudong Liu, Jingyang Zhang, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on video question answering, but their application to long-form videos is constrained by limited context length and computational cost, making keyframe sampling essential. Existing approaches typically rely on semantic relevance or reinforcement learning, which either fail to capture evidential clues or suffer from inefficient combinatorial optimization. In this work, we propose an evidence-driven keyframe sampling framework grounded in information bottleneck theory. We formulate keyframe selection as maximizing the conditional mutual information between selected frames and the query, providing a principled objective that reflects each frame's contribution to answering the question. To make this objective tractable, we exploit its structure to derive a decomposed optimization that reduces subset selection to independent frame-level scoring. We further introduce a query-conditioned evidence scoring network trained with a contrastive objective to estimate evidential importance efficiently. Experiments on long-form video understanding benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms prior sampling strategies under strict token budgets, while significantly improving training efficiency.

☆ EgoSim: Egocentric World Simulator for Embodied Interaction Generation

Jinkun Hao, Mingda Jia, Ruiyan Wang, Xihui Liu, Ran Yi, Lizhuang Ma, Jiangmiao Pang, Xudong Xu

We introduce EgoSim, a closed-loop egocentric world simulator that generates spatially consistent interaction videos and persistently updates the underlying 3D scene state for continuous simulation. Existing egocentric simulators either lack explicit 3D grounding, causing structural drift under viewpoint changes, or treat the scene as static, failing to update world states across multi-stage interactions. EgoSim addresses both limitations by modeling 3D scenes as updatable world states. We generate embodiment interactions via a Geometry-action-aware Observation Simulation model, with spatial consistency from an Interaction-aware State Updating module. To overcome the critical data bottleneck posed by the difficulty in acquiring densely aligned scene-interaction training pairs, we design a scalable pipeline that extracts static point clouds, camera trajectories, and embodiment actions from in-the-wild large-scale monocular egocentric videos. We further introduce EgoCap, a capture system that enables low-cost real-world data collection with uncalibrated smartphones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoSim significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of visual quality, spatial consistency, and generalization to complex scenes and in-the-wild dexterous interactions, while supporting cross-embodiment transfer to robotic manipulation. Codes and datasets will be open soon. The project page is at egosimulator.github.io.

comment: Project Page: egosimulator.github.io

☆ Customizing Large Vision Model-Guided Low-Rank Approximation for Ground-Roll Denoise

Jiacheng Liao, Feng Qian, Ziyin Fan, Yongjian Guo

Ground-roll is a dominant source of coherent noise in land and vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data, severely masking reflection events and degrading subsequent imaging and interpretation. Conventional attenuation methods, including transform-domain filtering, sparse representation, and deep learning, often suffer from limited adaptability, signal leakage, or dependence on labeled training data, especially under strong signal-noise overlap. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free framework that reformulates ground-roll attenuation as a semantic-guided signal separation problem. Specifically, a promptable large vision model is employed to extract high-level semantic priors by converting seismic gathers into visual representations and localizing ground-roll-dominant regions via text or image prompts. The resulting semantic response is transformed into a continuous soft mask, which is embedded into a mask-conditioned low-rank inverse formulation to enable spatially adaptive suppression and reflection-preserving reconstruction. An efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based solver is further developed to solve the proposed inverse problem, enabling stable and physically consistent signal recovery without requiring task-specific training or manual annotation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and field VSP datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior ground-roll attenuation while preserving reflection continuity and waveform fidelity, consistently outperforming representative transform-domain filtering and implicit neural representation methods.

☆ Maximizing T2-Only Prostate Cancer Localization from Expected Diffusion Weighted Imaging

Weixi Yi, Yipei Wang, Wen Yan, Hanyuan Zhang, Natasha Thorley, Alexander Ng, Shonit Punwani, Fernando Bianco, Mark Emberton, Veeru Kasivisvanathan, Dean C. Barratt, Shaheer U. Saeed, Yipeng Hu

Multiparametric MRI is increasingly recommended as a first-line noninvasive approach to detect and localize prostate cancer, requiring at minimum diffusion-weighted (DWI) and T2-weighted (T2w) MR sequences. Early machine learning attempts using only T2w images have shown promising diagnostic performance in segmenting radiologist-annotated lesions. Such uni-modal T2-only approaches deliver substantial clinical benefits by reducing costs and expertise required to acquire other sequences. This work investigates an arguably more challenging application using only T2w at inference, but to localize individual cancers based on independent histopathology labels. We formulate DWI images as a latent modality (readily available during training) to classify cancer presence at local Barzell zones, given only T2w images as input. In the resulting expectation-maximization algorithm, a latent modality generator (implemented using a flow matching-based generative model) approximates the latent DWI image posterior distribution in the E-steps, while in M-steps a cancer localizer is simultaneously optimized with the generative model to maximize the expected likelihood of cancer presence. The proposed approach provides a novel theoretical framework for learning from a privileged DWI modality, yielding superior cancer localization performance compared to approaches that lack training DWI images or existing frameworks for privileged learning and incomplete modalities. The proposed T2-only methods perform competitively or better than baseline methods using multiple input sequences (e.g., improving the patient-level F1 score by 14.4\% and zone-level QWK by 5.3\% over the T2w+DWI baseline). We present quantitative evaluations using internal and external datasets from 4,133 prostate cancer patients with histopathology-verified labels.

☆ ACT Now: Preempting LVLM Hallucinations via Adaptive Context Integration

Bei Yan, Yuecong Min, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) frequently suffer from severe hallucination issues. Existing mitigation strategies predominantly rely on isolated, single-step states to enhance visual focus or suppress strong linguistic priors. However, these static approaches neglect dynamic context changes across the generation process and struggles to correct inherited information loss. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Context inTegration (ACT), a training-free inference intervention method that mitigates hallucination through the adaptive integration of contextual information. Specifically, we first propose visual context exploration, which leverages spatio-temporal profiling to adaptively amplify attention heads responsible for visual exploration. To further facilitate vision-language alignment, we propose semantic context aggregation that marginalizes potential semantic queries to effectively aggregate visual evidence, thereby resolving the information loss caused by the discrete nature of token prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse LVLMs demonstrate that ACT significantly reduces hallucinations and achieves competitive results on both discriminative and generative benchmarks, acting as a robust and highly adaptable solution without compromising fundamental generation capabilities.

☆ DLWM: Dual Latent World Models enable Holistic Gaussian-centric Pre-training in Autonomous Driving CVPR 2026

Yiyao Zhu, Ying Xue, Haiming Zhang, Guangfeng Jiang, Wending Zhou, Xu Yan, Jiantao Gao, Yingjie Cai, Bingbing Liu, Zhen Li, Shaojie Shen

Vision-based autonomous driving has gained much attention due to its low costs and excellent performance. Compared with dense BEV (Bird's Eye View) or sparse query models, Gaussian-centric method is a comprehensive yet sparse representation by describing scene with 3D semantic Gaussians. In this paper, we introduce DLWM, a novel paradigm with Dual Latent World Models specifically designed to enable holistic gaussian-centric pre-training in autonomous driving using two stages. In the first stage, DLWM predicts 3D Gaussians from queries by self-supervised reconstructing multi-view semantic and depth images. Equipped with fine-grained contextual features, in the second stage, two latent world models are trained separately for temporal feature learning, including Gaussian-flow-guided latent prediction for downstream occupancy perception and forecasting tasks, and ego-planning-guided latent prediction for motion planning. Extensive experiments in SurroundOcc and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM shows significant performance gains across Gaussian-centric 3D occupancy perception, 4D occupancy forecasting and motion planning tasks.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026

☆ Enhancing Gradient Inversion Attacks in Federated Learning via Hierarchical Feature Optimization

Hao Fang, Wenbo Yu, Bin Chen, Xuan Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Qing Liao, Ke Xu

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a compelling paradigm for privacy-preserving distributed machine learning, allowing multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by transmitting locally computed gradients to a central server without exposing their private data. Nonetheless, recent studies find that the gradients exchanged in the FL system are also vulnerable to privacy leakage, e.g., an attacker can invert shared gradients to reconstruct sensitive data by leveraging pre-trained generative adversarial networks (GAN) as prior knowledge. However, existing attacks simply perform gradient inversion in the latent space of the GAN model, which limits their expression ability and generalizability. To tackle these challenges, we propose \textbf{G}radient \textbf{I}nversion over \textbf{F}eature \textbf{D}omains (GIFD), which disassembles the GAN model and searches the hierarchical features of the intermediate layers. Instead of optimizing only over the initial latent code, we progressively change the optimized layer, from the initial latent space to intermediate layers closer to the output images. In addition, we design a regularizer to avoid unreal image generation by adding a small ${l_1}$ ball constraint to the searching range. We also extend GIFD to the out-of-distribution (OOD) setting, which weakens the assumption that the training sets of GANs and FL tasks obey the same data distribution. Furthermore, we consider the challenging OOD scenario of label inconsistency and propose a label mapping technique as an effective solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve pixel-level reconstruction and outperform competitive baselines across a variety of FL scenarios.

☆ YieldSAT: A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for High-Resolution Crop Yield Prediction

Miro Miranda, Deepak Pathak, Patrick Helber, Benjamin Bischke, Hiba Najjar, Francisco Mena, Cristhian Sanchez, Akshay Pai, Diego Arenas, Matias Valdenegro-Toro, Marcela Charfuelan, Marlon Nuske, Andreas Dengel

Crop yield prediction requires substantial data to train scalable models. However, creating yield prediction datasets is constrained by high acquisition costs, heterogeneous data quality, and data privacy regulations. Consequently, existing datasets are scarce, low in quality, or limited to regional levels or single crop types, hindering the development of scalable data-driven solutions. In this work, we release YieldSAT, a large, high-quality, and multimodal dataset for high-resolution crop yield prediction. YieldSAT spans various climate zones across multiple countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Germany, and includes major crop types, including corn, rapeseed, soybeans, and wheat, across 2,173 expert-curated fields. In total, over 12.2 million yield samples are available, each with a spatial resolution of 10 m. Each field is paired with multispectral satellite imagery, resulting in 113,555 labeled satellite images, complemented by auxiliary environmental data. We demonstrate the potential of large-scale and high-resolution crop yield prediction as a pixel regression task by comparing various deep learning models and data fusion architectures. Furthermore, we highlight open challenges arising from severe distribution shifts in the ground truth data under real-world conditions. To mitigate this, we explore a domain-informed Deep Ensemble approach that exhibits significant performance gains. The dataset is available at https://yieldsat.github.io/.

☆ EmoScene: A Dual-space Dataset for Controllable Affective Image Generation

Li He, Longtai Zhang, Wenqiang Zhang, Yan Wang, Lizhe Qi

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved high visual fidelity, yet precise control over scene semantics and fine-grained affective tone remains challenging. Human visual affect arises from the rapid integration of contextual meaning, including valence, arousal, and dominance, with perceptual cues such as color harmony, luminance contrast, texture variation, curvature, and spatial layout. However, current text-to-image models rarely represent affective and perceptual factors within a unified representation, which limits their ability to synthesize scenes with coherent and nuanced emotional intent. To address this gap, we construct EmoScene, a large-scale dual-space emotion dataset that jointly encodes affective dimensions and perceptual attributes, with contextual semantics provided as supporting annotations. EmoScene contains 1.2M images across more than three hundred real-world scene categories, each annotated with discrete emotion labels, continuous VAD values, perceptual descriptors and textual captions. Multi-space analyses reveal how discrete emotions occupy the VAD space and how affect systematically correlates with scene-level perceptual factors. To benchmark EmoScene, we provide a lightweight reference baseline that injects dual-space controls into a frozen diffusion backbone via shallow cross-attention modulation, serving as a reproducible probe of affect controllability enabled by dual-space supervision.

☆ Autoregressive Appearance Prediction for 3D Gaussian Avatars

Michael Steiner, Zhang Chen, Alexander Richard, Vasu Agrawal, Markus Steinberger, Michael Zollhöfer

A photorealistic and immersive human avatar experience demands capturing fine, person-specific details such as cloth and hair dynamics, subtle facial expressions, and characteristic motion patterns. Achieving this requires large, high-quality datasets, which often introduce ambiguities and spurious correlations when very similar poses correspond to different appearances. Models that fit these details during training can overfit and produce unstable, abrupt appearance changes for novel poses. We propose a 3D Gaussian Splatting avatar model with a spatial MLP backbone that is conditioned on both pose and an appearance latent. The latent is learned during training by an encoder, yielding a compact representation that improves reconstruction quality and helps disambiguate pose-driven renderings. At driving time, our predictor autoregressively infers the latent, producing temporally smooth appearance evolution and improved stability. Overall, our method delivers a robust and practical path to high-fidelity, stable avatar driving.

comment: Project Page: https://steimich96.github.io/AAP-3DGA/

☆ Learning Quantised Structure-Preserving Motion Representations for Dance Fingerprinting

Arina Kharlamova, Bowei He, Chen Ma, Xue Liu

We present DANCEMATCH, an end-to-end framework for motion-based dance retrieval, the task of identifying semantically similar choreographies directly from raw video, defined as DANCE FINGERPRINTING. While existing motion analysis and retrieval methods can compare pose sequences, they rely on continuous embeddings that are difficult to index, interpret, or scale. In contrast, DANCEMATCH constructs compact, discrete motion signatures that capture the spatio-temporal structure of dance while enabling efficient large-scale retrieval. Our system integrates Skeleton Motion Quantisation (SMQ) with Spatio-Temporal Transformers (STT) to encode human poses, extracted via Apple CoMotion, into a structured motion vocabulary. We further design DANCE RETRIEVAL ENGINE (DRE), which performs sub-linear retrieval using a histogram-based index followed by re-ranking for refined matching. To facilitate reproducible research, we release DANCETYPESBENCHMARK, a pose-aligned dataset annotated with quantised motion tokens. Experiments demonstrate robust retrieval across diverse dance styles and strong generalisation to unseen choreographies, establishing a foundation for scalable motion fingerprinting and quantitative choreographic analysis.

☆ Representation Selection via Cross-Model Agreement using Canonical Correlation Analysis

Dylan B. Lewis, Jens Gregor, Hector Santos-Villalobos

Modern vision pipelines increasingly rely on pretrained image encoders whose representations are reused across tasks and models, yet these representations are often overcomplete and model-specific. We propose a simple, training-free method to improve the efficiency of image representations via a post-hoc canonical correlation analysis (CCA) operator. By leveraging the shared structure between representations produced by two pre-trained image encoders, our method finds linear projections that serve as a principled form of representation selection and dimensionality reduction, retaining shared semantic content while discarding redundant dimensions. Unlike standard dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA, which operate on a single embedding space, our approach leverages cross-model agreement to guide representation distillation and refinement. The technique allows representations to be reduced by more than 75% in dimensionality with improved downstream performance, or enhanced at fixed dimensionality via post-hoc representation transfer from larger or fine-tuned models. Empirical results on ImageNet-1k, CIFAR-100, MNIST, and additional benchmarks show consistent improvements over both baseline and PCA-projected representations, with accuracy gains of up to 12.6%.

comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables

☆ Benchmarking and Mechanistic Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Cross-Depiction Assembly Instruction Alignment

Zhuchenyang Liu, Yao Zhang, Yu Xiao

2D assembly diagrams are often abstract and hard to follow, creating a need for intelligent assistants that can monitor progress, detect errors, and provide step-by-step guidance. In mixed reality settings, such systems must recognize completed and ongoing steps from the camera feed and align them with the diagram instructions. Vision Language Models (VLMs) show promise for this task, but face a depiction gap because assembly diagrams and video frames share few visual features. To systematically assess this gap, we construct IKEA-Bench, a benchmark of 1,623 questions across 6 task types on 29 IKEA furniture products, and evaluate 19 VLMs (2B-38B) under three alignment strategies. Our key findings: (1) assembly instruction understanding is recoverable via text, but text simultaneously degrades diagram-to-video alignment; (2) architecture family predicts alignment accuracy more strongly than parameter count; (3) video understanding remains a hard bottleneck unaffected by strategy. A three-level mechanistic analysis further reveals that diagrams and video occupy disjoint ViT subspaces, and that adding text shifts models from visual to text-driven reasoning. These results identify visual encoding as the primary target for improving cross-depiction robustness. Project page: https://ryenhails.github.io/IKEA-Bench/

☆ ProCap: Projection-Aware Captioning for Spatial Augmented Reality

Zimo Cao, Yuchen Deng, Haibin Ling, Bingyao Huang

Spatial augmented reality (SAR) directly projects digital content onto physical scenes using projectors, creating immersive experience without head-mounted displays. However, for SAR to support intelligent interaction, such as reasoning about the scene or answering user queries, it must semantically distinguish between the physical scene and the projected content. Standard Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle with this virtual-physical ambiguity, often confusing the two contexts. To address this issue, we introduce ProCap, a novel framework that explicitly decouples projected content from physical scenes. ProCap employs a two-stage pipeline: first it visually isolates virtual and physical layers via automated segmentation; then it uses region-aware retrieval to avoid ambiguous semantic context due to projection distortion. To support this, we present RGBP (RGB + Projections), the first large-scale SAR semantic benchmark dataset, featuring 65 diverse physical scenes and over 180,000 projections with dense, decoupled annotations. Finally, we establish a dual-captioning evaluation protocol using task-specific tokens to assess physical scene and projection descriptions independently. Our experiments show that ProCap provides a robust semantic foundation for future SAR research. The source code, pre-trained models and the RGBP dataset are available on the project page: https://ZimoCao.github.io/ProCap/.

comment: 16 pages, 7 figures

☆ JAMMEval: A Refined Collection of Japanese Benchmarks for Reliable VLM Evaluation

Issa Sugiura, Koki Maeda, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Oda, Daisuke Kawahara, Naoaki Okazaki

Reliable evaluation is essential for the development of vision-language models (VLMs). However, Japanese VQA benchmarks have undergone far less iterative refinement than their English counterparts. As a result, many existing benchmarks contain issues such as ambiguous questions, incorrect answers, and instances that can be solved without visual grounding, undermining evaluation reliability and leading to misleading conclusions in model comparisons. To address these limitations, we introduce JAMMEval, a refined collection of Japanese benchmarks for reliable VLM evaluation. It is constructed by systematically refining seven existing Japanese benchmark datasets through two rounds of human annotation, improving both data quality and evaluation reliability. In our experiments, we evaluate open-weight and proprietary VLMs on JAMMEval and analyze the capabilities of recent models on Japanese VQA. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our refinement by showing that the resulting benchmarks yield evaluation scores that better reflect model capability, exhibit lower run-to-run variance, and improve the ability to distinguish between models of different capability levels. We release our dataset and code to advance reliable evaluation of VLMs.

comment: 16 pages, 11 figures

☆ IDDM: Identity-Decoupled Personalized Diffusion Models with a Tunable Privacy-Utility Trade-off

Linyan Dai, Xinwei Zhang, Haoyang Li, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu

Personalized text-to-image diffusion models (e.g., DreamBooth, LoRA) enable users to synthesize high-fidelity avatars from a few reference photos for social expression. However, once these generations are shared on social media platforms (e.g., Instagram, Facebook), they can be linked to the real user via face recognition systems, enabling identity tracking and profiling. Existing defenses mainly follow an anti-personalization strategy that protects publicly released reference photos by disrupting model fine-tuning. While effective against unauthorized personalization, they do not address another practical setting in which personalization is authorized, but the resulting public outputs still leak identity information. To address this problem, we introduce a new defense setting, termed model-side output immunization, whose goal is to produce a personalized model that supports authorized personalization while reducing the identity linkability of public generations, with tunable control over the privacy-utility trade-off to accommodate diverse privacy needs. To this end, we propose Identity-Decoupled personalized Diffusion Models (IDDM), a model-side defense that integrates identity decoupling into the personalization pipeline. Concretely, IDDM follows an alternating procedure that interleaves short personalization updates with identity-decoupled data optimization, using a two-stage schedule to balance identity linkability suppression and generation utility. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, diverse prompts, and state-of-the-art face recognition systems show that IDDM consistently reduces identity linkability while preserving high-quality personalized generation.

☆ Super-Resolving Coarse-Resolution Weather Forecasts With Flow Matching

Aymeric Delefosse, Anastase Charantonis, Dominique Béréziat

Machine learning-based weather forecasting models now surpass state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction systems, but training and operating these models at high spatial resolution remains computationally expensive. We present a modular framework that decouples forecasting from spatial resolution by applying learned generative super-resolution as a post-processing step to coarse-resolution forecast trajectories. We formulate super-resolution as a stochastic inverse problem, using a residual formulation to preserve large-scale structure while reconstructing unresolved variability. The model is trained with flow matching exclusively on reanalysis data and is applied to global medium-range forecasts. We evaluate (i) design consistency by re-coarsening super-resolved forecasts and comparing them to the original coarse trajectories, and (ii) high-resolution forecast quality using standard ensemble verification metrics and spectral diagnostics. Results show that super-resolution preserves large-scale structure and variance after re-coarsening, introduces physically consistent small-scale variability, and achieves competitive probabilistic forecast skill at 0.25° resolution relative to an operational ensemble baseline, while requiring only a modest additional training cost compared with end-to-end high-resolution forecasting.

comment: Accepted to Climate Informatics 2026

☆ Beyond Symbolic Solving: Multi Chain-of-Thought Voting for Geometric Reasoning in Large Language Models

Md. Abu Bakor Siddique, Shahrin Hossain, Sadman Ahmed Siam, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan

Geometric Problem Solving (GPS) remains at the heart of enhancing mathematical reasoning in large language models because it requires the combination of diagrammatic understanding, symbolic manipulation and logical inference. In existing literature, researchers have chiefly focused on synchronising the diagram descriptions with text literals and solving the problem. In this vein, they have either taken a neural, symbolic or neuro-symbolic approach. But this solves only the first two of the requirements, namely diagrammatic understanding and symbolic manipulation, while leaving logical inference underdeveloped. The logical inference is often limited to one chain-of-thought (CoT). To address this weakness in hitherto existing models, this paper proposes MARS-GPS, that generates multiple parallel reasoning rollouts augmented with Python code execution for numerical verification, ranks them using token-level entropy as a confidence signal, and aggregates answers through a multi-stage voting and self-verification pipeline. Empirical results show that MARS-GPS with 8 parallel rollouts achieves 88.8% on Geometry3K, a nearly +11% improvement over the prior state-of-the-art, with accuracy scaling consistently as the number of rollouts increases from 1 to 16 (+6.0% on ablation subset). We provide our code and data in an anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MARS-GPS-DE55.

comment: Under review, 4 figures, 7 tables

☆ Adversarial Attenuation Patch Attack for SAR Object Detection

Yiming Zhang, Weibo Qin, Feng Wang

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performance in SAR target detection tasks but remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Existing SAR-specific attack methods can effectively deceive detectors; however, they often introduce noticeable perturbations and are largely confined to digital domain, neglecting physical implementation constrains for attacking SAR systems. In this paper, a novel Adversarial Attenuation Patch (AAP) method is proposed that employs energy-constrained optimization strategy coupled with an attenuation-based deployment framework to achieve a seamless balance between attack effectiveness and stealthiness. More importantly, AAP exhibits strong potential for physical realization by aligning with signal-level electronic jamming mechanisms. Experimental results show that AAP effectively degrades detection performance while preserving high imperceptibility, and shows favorable transferability across different models. This study provides a physical grounded perspective for adversarial attacks on SAR target detection systems and facilitates the design of more covert and practically deployable attack strategies. The source code is made available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAAP.

comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Source code is available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAAP

☆ PixelPrune: Pixel-Level Adaptive Visual Token Reduction via Predictive Coding

Nan Wang, Zhiwei Jin, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu

Document understanding and GUI interaction are among the highest-value applications of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet they impose exceptionally heavy computational burden: fine-grained text and small UI elements demand high-resolution inputs that produce tens of thousands of visual tokens. We observe that this cost is largely wasteful -- across document and GUI benchmarks, only 22--71\% of image patches are pixel-unique, the rest being exact duplicates of another patch in the same image. We propose \textbf{PixelPrune}, which exploits this pixel-level redundancy through predictive-coding-based compression, pruning redundant patches \emph{before} the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder. Because it operates in pixel space prior to any neural computation, PixelPrune accelerates both the ViT encoder and the downstream LLM, covering the full inference pipeline. The method is training-free, requires no learnable parameters, and supports pixel-lossless compression ($τ{=}0$) as well as controlled lossy compression ($τ{>}0$). Experiments across three model scales and document and GUI benchmarks show that PixelPrune maintains competitive task accuracy while delivering up to 4.2$\times$ inference speedup and 1.9$\times$ training acceleration. Code is available at https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/PixelPrune.

☆ A 4D Representation for Training-Free Agentic Reasoning from Monocular Laparoscopic Video

Maximilian Fehrentz, Nicolas Stellwag, Robert Wiebe, Nicole Thorisch, Fabian Grob, Patrick Remerscheid, Ken-Joel Simmoteit, Benjamin D. Killeen, Christian Heiliger, Nassir Navab

Spatiotemporal reasoning is a fundamental capability for artificial intelligence (AI) in soft tissue surgery, paving the way for intelligent assistive systems and autonomous robotics. While 2D vision-language models show increasing promise at understanding surgical video, the spatial complexity of surgical scenes suggests that reasoning systems may benefit from explicit 4D representations. Here, we propose a framework for equipping surgical agents with spatiotemporal tools based on an explicit 4D representation, enabling AI systems to ground their natural language reasoning in both time and 3D space. Leveraging models for point tracking, depth, and segmentation, we develop a coherent 4D model with spatiotemporally consistent tool and tissue semantics. A Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) then acts as an agent on tools derived from the explicit 4D representation (e.g., trajectories) without any fine-tuning. We evaluate our method on a new dataset of 134 clinically relevant questions and find that the combination of a general purpose reasoning backbone and our 4D representation significantly improves spatiotemporal understanding and allows for 4D grounding. We demonstrate that spatiotemporal intelligence can be "assembled" from 2D MLLMs and 3D computer vision models without additional training. Code, data, and examples are available at https://tum-ai.github.io/surg4d/

☆ Shape Representation using Gaussian Process mixture models

Panagiotis Sapoutzoglou, George Terzakis, Georgios Floros, Maria Pateraki

Traditional explicit 3D representations, such as point clouds and meshes, demand significant storage to capture fine geometric details and require complex indexing systems for surface lookups, making functional representations an efficient, compact, and continuous alternative. In this work, we propose a novel, object-specific functional shape representation that models surface geometry with Gaussian Process (GP) mixture models. Rather than relying on computationally heavy neural architectures, our method is lightweight, leveraging GPs to learn continuous directional distance fields from sparsely sampled point clouds. We capture complex topologies by anchoring local GP priors at strategic reference points, which can be flexibly extracted using any structural decomposition method (e.g. skeletonization, distance-based clustering). Extensive evaluations on the ShapeNetCore and IndustryShapes datasets demonstrate that our method can efficiently and accurately represent complex geometries.

comment: To appear in ISPRS 2026

☆ Sparkle: A Robust and Versatile Representation for Point Cloud based Human Motion Capture ICLR 2026

Yiming Ren, Yujing Sun, Aoru Xue, Kwok-Yan Lam, Yuexin Ma

Point cloud-based motion capture leverages rich spatial geometry and privacy-preserving sensing, but learning robust representations from noisy, unstructured point clouds remains challenging. Existing approaches face a struggle trade-off between point-based methods (geometrically detailed but noisy) and skeleton-based ones (robust but oversimplified). We address the fundamental challenge: how to construct an effective representation for human motion capture that can balance expressiveness and robustness. In this paper, we propose Sparkle, a structured representation unifying skeletal joints and surface anchors with explicit kinematic-geometric factorization. Our framework, SparkleMotion, learns this representation through hierarchical modules embedding geometric continuity and kinematic constraints. By explicitly disentangling internal kinematic structure from external surface geometry, SparkleMotion achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in accuracy but crucially in robustness and generalization under severe domain shifts, noise, and occlusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superiority across diverse sensor types and challenging real-world scenarios.

comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026

☆ Perturb-and-Restore: Simulation-driven Structural Augmentation Framework for Imbalance Chromosomal Anomaly Detection

Yilan Zhang, Hanbiao Chen, Changchun Yang, Yuetan Chu, Siyuan Chen, Jing Wu, Jingdong Hu, Na Li, Junkai Su, Yuxuan Chen, Ao Xu, Xin Gao, Aihua Yin

Detecting structural chromosomal abnormalities is crucial for accurate diagnosis and management of genetic disorders. However, collecting sufficient structural abnormality data is extremely challenging and costly in clinical practice, and not all abnormal types can be readily collected. As a result, deep learning approaches face significant performance degradation due to the severe imbalance and scarcity of abnormal chromosome data. To address this challenge, we propose a Perturb-and-Restore (P&R), a simulation-driven structural augmentation framework that effectively alleviates data imbalance in chromosome anomaly detection. The P&R framework comprises two key components: (1) Structure Perturbation and Restoration Simulation, which generates synthetic abnormal chromosomes by perturbing chromosomal banding patterns of normal chromosomes followed by a restoration diffusion network that reconstructs continuous chromosome content and edges, thus eliminating reliance on rare abnormal samples; and (2) Energy-guided Adaptive Sampling, an energy score-based online selection strategy that dynamically prioritizes high-quality synthetic samples by referencing the energy distribution of real samples. To evaluate our method, we construct a comprehensive structural anomaly dataset consisting of over 260,000 chromosome images, including 4,242 abnormal samples spanning 24 categories. Experimental results demonstrate that the P&R framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, surpassing existing methods with an average improvement of 8.92% in sensitivity, 8.89% in precision, and 13.79% in F1-score across all categories.

comment: This preprint version of the manuscript has been submitted to the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI) for review

☆ MotionGrounder: Grounded Multi-Object Motion Transfer via Diffusion Transformer

Samuel Teodoro, Yun Chen, Agus Gunawan, Soo Ye Kim, Jihyong Oh, Munchurl Kim

Motion transfer enables controllable video generation by transferring temporal dynamics from a reference video to synthesize a new video conditioned on a target caption. However, existing Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based methods are limited to single-object videos, restricting fine-grained control in real-world scenes with multiple objects. In this work, we introduce MotionGrounder, a DiT-based framework that firstly handles motion transfer with multi-object controllability. Our Flow-based Motion Signal (FMS) in MotionGrounder provides a stable motion prior for target video generation, while our Object-Caption Alignment Loss (OCAL) grounds object captions to their corresponding spatial regions. We further propose a new Object Grounding Score (OGS), which jointly evaluates (i) spatial alignment between source video objects and their generated counterparts and (ii) semantic consistency between each generated object and its target caption. Our experiments show that MotionGrounder consistently outperforms recent baselines across quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations.

comment: Please visit our project page at https://kaist-viclab.github.io/motiongrounder-site/

☆ Disentangling to Re-couple: Resolving the Similarity-Controllability Paradox in Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation CVPR 2026

Shuang Li, Chao Deng, Hang Chen, Liqun Liu, Zhenyu Hu, Te Cao, Mengge Xue, Yuan Chen, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang

Subject-Driven Text-to-Image (T2I) Generation aims to preserve a subject's identity while editing its context based on a text prompt. A core challenge in this task is the "similarity-controllability paradox", where enhancing textual control often degrades the subject's fidelity, and vice-versa. We argue this paradox stems from the ambiguous role of text prompts, which are often tasked with describing both the subject and the desired modifications, leading to conflicting signals for the model. To resolve this, we propose DisCo, a novel framework that first Disntangles and then re-Couples visual and textual information. First, our textual-visual decoupling module isolates the sources of information: subject identity is extracted exclusively from the reference image with the entity word of the subject, while the text prompt is simplified to contain only the modification command, where the subject refers to general pronouns, eliminating descriptive ambiguity. However, this strict separation can lead to unnatural compositions between the subject and its contexts. We address this by designing a dedicated reward signal and using reinforcement learning to seamlessly recouple the visually-defined subject and the textually-generated context. Our approach effectively resolves the paradox, enabling simultaneous high-fidelity subject preservation and precise textual control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing highly realistic and coherent images.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026 (Main)

☆ LinguDistill: Recovering Linguistic Ability in Vision- Language Models via Selective Cross-Modal Distillation

Patrick Amadeus Irawan, Erland Hilman Fuadi, Shanu Kumar, Alham Fikri Aji, Yova Kementchedjhieva

Adapting pretrained language models (LMs) into vision-language models (VLMs) can degrade their native linguistic capability due to representation shift and cross-modal interference introduced during multimodal adaptation. Such loss is difficult to recover, even with targeted task-specific fine-tuning using standard objectives. Prior recovery approaches typically introduce additional modules that act as intermediate alignment layers to maintain or isolate modality-specific subspaces, which increases architectural complexity, adds parameters at inference time, and limits flexibility across models and settings. We propose LinguDistill, an adapter-free distillation method that restores linguistic capability by utilizing the original frozen LM as a teacher. We overcome the key challenge of enabling vision-conditioned teacher supervision by introducing layer-wise KV-cache sharing, which exposes the teacher to the student's multimodal representations without modifying the architecture of either model. We then selectively distill the teacher's strong linguistic signal on language-intensive data to recover language capability, while preserving the student's visual grounding on multimodal tasks. As a result, LinguDistill recovers $\sim$10% of the performance lost on language and knowledge benchmarks, while maintaining comparable performance on vision-heavy tasks. Our findings demonstrate that linguistic capability can be recovered without additional modules, providing an efficient and practical solution to modality-specific degradation in multimodal models.

☆ Video Patch Pruning: Efficient Video Instance Segmentation via Early Token Reduction CVPR'26

Patrick Glandorf, Thomas Norrenbrock, Bodo Rosenhahn

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated state-ofthe-art performance in several benchmarks, yet their high computational costs hinders their practical deployment. Patch Pruning offers significant savings, but existing approaches restrict token reduction to deeper layers, leaving early-stage compression unexplored. This limits their potential for holistic efficiency. In this work, we present a novel Video Patch Pruning framework (VPP) that integrates temporal prior knowledge to enable efficient sparsity within early ViT layers. Our approach is motivated by the observation that prior features extracted from deeper layers exhibit strong foreground selectivity. Therefore we propose a fully differentiable module for temporal mapping to accurately select the most relevant patches in early network stages. Notably, the proposed method enables a patch reduction of up to 60% in dense prediction tasks, exceeding the capabilities of conventional image-based patch pruning, which typically operate around a 30% patch sparsity. VPP excels the high-sparsity regime, sustaining remarkable performance even when patch usage is reduced below 55%. Specifically, it preserves stable results with a maximal performance drop of 0.6% on the Youtube-VIS 2021 dataset.

comment: CVPR'26 Workshops

☆ Continual Vision-Language Learning for Remote Sensing: Benchmarking and Analysis

Xingxing Weng, Ruifeng Ni, Chao Pang, XiangYu Hao, Yishan Wang, Xiaokang Zhang, Wei Xu, Gui-Song Xia

Current remote sensing vision-language models (RS VLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in image interpretation but rely on static training data, limiting their ability to accommodate continuously emerging sensing modalities and downstream tasks. This exposes a fundamental challenge: enabling RS VLMs to continually adapt without catastrophic forgetting. Despite its practical importance, the continual learning capability of RS VLMs remains underexplored, and no dedicated benchmark currently exists. In this work, we present CLeaRS, a comprehensive benchmark for continual vision-language learning in remote sensing. CLeaRS comprises 10 curated subsets with over 207k image-text pairs, spanning diverse interpretation tasks, sensing modalities, and application scenarios. We further define three evaluation protocols: long-horizon, modality-incremental, and task-incremental settings, to systematically assess continual adaptation. Extensive benchmarking of diverse vision-language models reveals catastrophic forgetting across all settings. Moreover, representative continual learning methods, when adapted to RS VLMs, exhibit limited effectiveness in handling task, instruction, and modality transitions. Our findings underscore the need for developing continual learning methods tailored to RS VLMs.

comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables

☆ Multicentric thrombus segmentation using an attention-based recurrent network with gradual modality dropout

Sofia Vargas-Ibarra, Vincent Vigneron, Hichem Maaref, Sonia Garcia-Salicetti

Detecting and delineating tiny targets in 3D brain scans is a central yet under-addressed challenge in medical imaging.In ischemic stroke, for instance, the culprit thrombus is small, low-contrast, and variably expressed across modalities(e.g., susceptibility-weighted T2 blooming, diffusion restriction on DWI/ADC), while real-world multi-center dataintroduce domain shifts, anisotropy, and frequent missing sequences. We introduce a methodology that couples an attention-based recurrent segmentation network (UpAttLLSTM), a training schedule that progressively increases the difficulty of hetero-modal learning, with gradual modality dropout, UpAttLLSTM aggregates context across slices via recurrent units (2.5D) and uses attention gates to fuse complementary cues across available sequences, making it robust to anisotropy and class imbalance. Gradual modality dropout systematically simulates site heterogeneity,noise, and missing modalities during training, acting as both augmentation and regularization to improve multi-center generalization. On a monocentric cohort, our approach detects thrombi in >90% of cases with a Dice score of 0.65. In a multi-center setting with missing modalities, it achieves-80% detection with a Dice score around 0.35. Beyond stroke, the proposed methodology directly transfers to other small-lesion tasks in 3D medical imaging where targets are scarce, subtle, and modality-dependent

☆ DVGT-2: Vision-Geometry-Action Model for Autonomous Driving at Scale

Sicheng Zuo, Zixun Xie, Wenzhao Zheng, Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Hanbing Li, Long Chen, Zhi-Xin Yang, Jiwen Lu

End-to-end autonomous driving has evolved from the conventional paradigm based on sparse perception into vision-language-action (VLA) models, which focus on learning language descriptions as an auxiliary task to facilitate planning. In this paper, we propose an alternative Vision-Geometry-Action (VGA) paradigm that advocates dense 3D geometry as the critical cue for autonomous driving. As vehicles operate in a 3D world, we think dense 3D geometry provides the most comprehensive information for decision-making. However, most existing geometry reconstruction methods (e.g., DVGT) rely on computationally expensive batch processing of multi-frame inputs and cannot be applied to online planning. To address this, we introduce a streaming Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT-2), which processes inputs in an online manner and jointly outputs dense geometry and trajectory planning for the current frame. We employ temporal causal attention and cache historical features to support on-the-fly inference. To further enhance efficiency, we propose a sliding-window streaming strategy and use historical caches within a certain interval to avoid repetitive computations. Despite the faster speed, DVGT-2 achieves superior geometry reconstruction performance on various datasets. The same trained DVGT-2 can be directly applied to planning across diverse camera configurations without fine-tuning, including closed-loop NAVSIM and open-loop nuScenes benchmarks.

comment: Code is available at \href{https://github.com/wzzheng/DVGT}

☆ Revisiting Human-in-the-Loop Object Retrieval with Pre-Trained Vision Transformers

Kawtar Zaher, Olivier Buisson, Alexis Joly

Building on existing approaches, we revisit Human-in-the-Loop Object Retrieval, a task that consists of iteratively retrieving images containing objects of a class-of-interest, specified by a user-provided query. Starting from a large unlabeled image collection, the aim is to rapidly identify diverse instances of an object category relying solely on the initial query and the user's Relevance Feedback, with no prior labels. The retrieval process is formulated as a binary classification task, where the system continuously learns to distinguish between relevant and non-relevant images to the query, through iterative user interaction. This interaction is guided by an Active Learning loop: at each iteration, the system selects informative samples for user annotation, thereby refining the retrieval performance. This task is particularly challenging in multi-object datasets, where the object of interest may occupy only a small region of the image within a complex, cluttered scene. Unlike object-centered settings where global descriptors often suffice, multi-object images require more adapted, localized descriptors. In this work, we formulate and revisit the Human-in-the-Loop Object Retrieval task by leveraging pre-trained ViT representations, and addressing key design questions, including which object instances to consider in an image, what form the annotations should take, how Active Selection should be applied, and which representation strategies best capture the object's features. We compare several representation strategies across multi-object datasets highlighting trade-offs between capturing the global context and focusing on fine-grained local object details. Our results offer practical insights for the design of effective interactive retrieval pipelines based on Active Learning for object class retrieval.

☆ Compact Keyframe-Optimized Multi-Agent Gaussian Splatting SLAM

Monica M. Q. Li, Pierre-Yves Lajoie, Jialiang Liu, Giovanni Beltrame

Efficient multi-agent 3D mapping is essential for robotic teams operating in unknown environments, but dense representations hinder real-time exchange over constrained communication links. In multi-agent Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), systems typically rely on a centralized server to merge and optimize the local maps produced by individual agents. However, sharing these large map representations, particularly those generated by recent methods such as Gaussian Splatting, becomes a bottleneck in real-world scenarios with limited bandwidth. We present an improved multi-agent RGB-D Gaussian Splatting SLAM framework that reduces communication load while preserving map fidelity. First, we incorporate a compaction step into our SLAM system to remove redundant 3D Gaussians, without degrading the rendering quality. Second, our approach performs centralized loop closure computation without initial guess, operating in two modes: a pure rendered-depth mode that requires no data beyond the 3D Gaussians, and a camera-depth mode that includes lightweight depth images for improved registration accuracy and additional Gaussian pruning. Evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets shows up to 85-95\% reduction in transmitted data compared to state-of-the-art approaches in both modes, bringing 3D Gaussian multi-agent SLAM closer to practical deployment in real-world scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lemonci/coko-slam

☆ Multimodal Language Models Cannot Spot Spatial Inconsistencies

Om Khangaonkar, Hadi J. Rad, Hamed Pirsiavash

Spatial consistency is a fundamental property of the visual world and a key requirement for models that aim to understand physical reality. Despite recent advances, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to reason about 3D geometry across multiple views. Rather than asking models to describe scene attributes, we introduce a more challenging task: given two views of the same scene, identify the object that violates 3D motion consistency. We propose a simple and scalable method for generating realistic, spatially inconsistent image pairs from multi-view scenes, enabling systematic evaluation of this capability. Our results show that state-of-the-art MLLMs significantly underperform human observers and exhibit substantial variability across different scene attributes, revealing a fragile and incomplete understanding of 3D structure. We hope our findings underscore the need for approaches that develop a more deeply grounded understanding of the physical world.

☆ HICT: High-precision 3D CBCT reconstruction from a single X-ray

Wen Ma, Jiaxiang Liu, Zikai Xiao, Ziyang Wang, Feng Yang, Zuozhu Liu

Accurate 3D dental imaging is vital for diagnosis and treatment planning, yet CBCT's high radiation dose and cost limit its accessibility. Reconstructing 3D volumes from a single low-dose panoramic X-ray is a promising alternative but remains challenging due to geometric inconsistencies and limited accuracy. We propose HiCT, a two-stage framework that first generates geometrically consistent multi-view projections from a single panoramic image using a video diffusion model, and then reconstructs high-fidelity CBCT from the projections using a ray-based dynamic attention network and an X-ray sampling strategy. To support this, we built XCT, a large-scale dataset combining public CBCT data with 500 paired PX-CBCT cases. Extensive experiments show that HiCT achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering accurate and geometrically consistent reconstructions for clinical use.

☆ An Approach to Enriching Surgical Video Datasets for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding of Vision-Language Models

Lennart Maack, Alexander Schlaefer

Surgical video understanding is a crucial prerequisite for advancing Computer-Assisted Surgery. While vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been applied to the surgical domain, existing surgical vision-language datasets lack in capturing and evaluating complex, interleaved spatial-temporal dynamics. Creating large scale datasets that accurately represent fine-grained spatial-temporal relationships in surgical videos is challenging due to costly manual annotations or error-prone generation using large language models. To address this gap, we introduce the SurgSTU-Pipeline, a deterministic generation pipeline featuring temporal and spatial continuity filtering to reliably create surgical datasets for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. Applying this pipeline to publicly available surgical datasets, we create the SurgSTU dataset, comprising 7515 video clips densely extended with 150k fine-grained spatial-temporal question-answer samples. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that while state-of-the-art generalist VLMs struggle in zero-shot settings, their spatial-temporal capabilities can be improved through in-context learning. A fine-tuned VLM on the SurgSTU training dataset achieves highest performance among all spatial-temporal tasks, validating the dataset's efficacy to improve spatial-temporal understanding of VLMs in surgical videos. Code will be made publicly available.

☆ Using predefined vector systems to speed up neural network multimillion class classification

Nikita Gabdullin, Ilya Androsov

Label prediction in neural networks (NNs) has O(n) complexity proportional to the number of classes. This holds true for classification using fully connected layers and cosine similarity with some set of class prototypes. In this paper we show that if NN latent space (LS) geometry is known and possesses specific properties, label prediction complexity can be significantly reduced. This is achieved by associating label prediction with the O(1) complexity closest cluster center search in a vector system used as target for latent space configuration (LSC). The proposed method only requires finding indexes of several largest and lowest values in the embedding vector making it extremely computationally efficient. We show that the proposed method does not change NN training accuracy computational results. We also measure the time required by different computational stages of NN inference and label prediction on multiple datasets. The experiments show that the proposed method allows to achieve up to 11.6 times overall acceleration over conventional methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has unique properties which allow to predict the existence of new classes.

comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, 2 algorithms, 1 theorem, 1 lemma

☆ PrivHAR-Bench: A Graduated Privacy Benchmark Dataset for Video-Based Action Recognition

Samar Ansari

Existing research on privacy-preserving Human Activity Recognition (HAR) typically evaluates methods against a binary paradigm: clear video versus a single privacy transformation. This limits cross-method comparability and obscures the nuanced relationship between privacy strength and recognition utility. We introduce \textit{PrivHAR-Bench}, a multi-tier benchmark dataset designed to standardize the evaluation of the \textit{Privacy-Utility Trade-off} in video-based action recognition. PrivHAR-Bench applies a graduated spectrum of visual privacy transformations: from lightweight spatial obfuscation to cryptographic block permutation, to a curated subset of 15 activity classes selected for human articulation diversity. Each of the 1,932 source videos is distributed across 9 parallel tiers of increasing privacy strength, with additional background-removed variants to isolate the contribution of human motion features from contextual scene bias. We provide lossless frame sequences, per-frame bounding boxes, estimated pose keypoints with joint-level confidence scores, standardized group-based train/test splits, and an evaluation toolkit computing recognition accuracy and privacy metrics. Empirical validation using R3D-18 demonstrates a measurable and interpretable degradation curve across tiers, with within-tier accuracy declining from 88.8\% (clear) to 53.5\% (encrypted, background-removed) and cross-domain accuracy collapsing to 4.8\%, establishing PrivHAR-Bench as a controlled benchmark for comparing privacy-preserving HAR methods under standardized conditions. The dataset, generation pipeline, and evaluation code are publicly available.

☆ IWP: Token Pruning as Implicit Weight Pruning in Large Vision Language Models

Dong-Jae Lee, Sunghyun Baek, Junmo Kim

Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through empirical approaches while overlooking the internal mechanism of attention. In this paper, we propose a novel training free token pruning framework grounded in the dual form perspective of attention. We reformulate attention as an implicit linear layer whose weight matrix is the sum of rank 1 outer products, each generated by a single token's key value pair. Token pruning thus reduces to selecting an optimal subset of these rank 1 updates that best approximates the original dual weight matrix. Extending this perspective to standard softmax attention in LVLMs, we derive a novel metric quantifying both a token's information magnitude and information duplication. To efficiently select the subset with the proposed metric, we introduce Progressive Chunked Maximal Marginal Relevance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a better trade off between performance and efficiency, while providing another perspective on existing pruning approaches.

☆ A Benchmark of State-Space Models vs. Transformers and BiLSTM-based Models for Historical Newspaper OCR

Merveilles Agbeti-messan, Thierry Paquet, Clément Chatelain, Pierrick Tranouez, Stéphane Nicolas

End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts. While Transformer-based recognizers dominate current research, their quadratic complexity limits efficient paragraph-level transcription and large-scale deployment. We investigate linear-time State-Space Models (SSMs), specifically Mamba, as a scalable alternative to Transformer-based sequence modeling for OCR. We present to our knowledge, the first OCR architecture based on SSMs, combining a CNN visual encoder with bi-directional and autoregressive Mamba sequence modeling, and conduct a large-scale benchmark comparing SSMs with Transformer- and BiLSTM-based recognizers. Multiple decoding strategies (CTC, autoregressive, and non-autoregressive) are evaluated under identical training conditions alongside strong neural baselines (VAN, DAN, DANIEL) and widely used off-the-shelf OCR engines (PERO-OCR, Tesseract OCR, TrOCR, Gemini). Experiments on historical newspapers from the Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, with newly released >99% verified gold-standard annotations, and cross-dataset tests on Fraktur and Antiqua lines, show that all neural models achieve low error rates (~2% CER), making computational efficiency the main differentiator. Mamba-based models maintain competitive accuracy while halving inference time and exhibiting superior memory scaling (1.26x vs 2.30x growth at 1000 chars), reaching 6.07% CER at the severely degraded paragraph level compared to 5.24% for DAN, while remaining 2.05x faster. We release code, trained models, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable reproducible research and guide practitioners in large-scale cultural heritage OCR.

☆ TTA-Vid: Generalized Test-Time Adaptation for Video Reasoning

Soumya Shamarao Jahagirdar, Edson Araujo, Anna Kukleva, M. Jehanzeb Mirza, Saurabhchand Bhati, Samuel Thomas, Brian Kingsbury, Rogerio Feris, James R. Glass, Hilde Kuehne

Recent video reasoning models have shown strong results on temporal and multimodal understanding, yet they depend on large-scale supervised data and multi-stage training pipelines, making them costly to train and difficult to adapt to new domains. In this work, we leverage the paradigm of Test-Time Reinforcement Learning on video-language data to allow for adapting a pretrained model to incoming video samples at test-time without explicit labels. The proposed test-time adaptation for video approach (TTA-Vid) combines two components that work simultaneously: (1) a test-time adaptation that performs step-by-step reasoning at inference time on multiple frame subsets. We then use a batch-aware frequency-based reward computed across different frame subsets as pseudo ground truth to update the model. It shows that the resulting model trained on a single batch or even a single sample from a dataset, is able to generalize at test-time to the whole dataset and even across datasets. Because the adaptation occurs entirely at test time, our method requires no ground-truth annotations or dedicated training splits. Additionally, we propose a multi-armed bandit strategy for adaptive frame selection that learns to prioritize informative frames, guided by the same reward formulation. Our evaluation shows that TTA-Vid yields consistent improvements across various video reasoning tasks and is able to outperform current state-of-the-art methods trained on large-scale data. This highlights the potential of test-time reinforcement learning for temporal multimodal understanding.

☆ TP-Seg: Task-Prototype Framework for Unified Medical Lesion Segmentation

Jiawei Xu, Qiangqiang Zhou, Dandan Zhu, Yong Chen, Yugen Yi, Xiaoqi Zhao

Building a unified model with a single set of parameters to efficiently handle diverse types of medical lesion segmentation has become a crucial objective for AI-assisted diagnosis. Existing unified segmentation approaches typically rely on shared encoders across heterogeneous tasks and modalities, which often leads to feature entanglement, gradient interference, and suboptimal lesion discrimination. In this work, we propose TP-Seg, a task-prototype framework for unified medical lesion segmentation. On one hand, the task-conditioned adapter effectively balances shared and task-specific representations through a dual-path expert structure, enabling adaptive feature extraction across diverse medical imaging modalities and lesion types. On the other hand, the prototype-guided task decoder introduces learnable task prototypes as semantic anchors and employs a cross-attention mechanism to achieve fine-grained modeling of task-specific foreground and background semantics. Without bells and whistles, TP-Seg consistently outperforms specialized, general and unified segmentation methods across 8 different medical lesion segmentation tasks covering multiple imaging modalities, demonstrating strong generalization, scalability and clinical applicability.

☆ MoonAnything: A Vision Benchmark with Large-Scale Lunar Supervised Data ACM MM

Clémentine Grethen, Yuang Shi, Simone Gasparini, Géraldine Morin

Accurate perception of lunar surfaces is critical for modern lunar exploration missions. However, developing robust learning-based perception systems is hindered by the lack of datasets that provide both geometric and photometric supervision. Existing lunar datasets typically lack either geometric ground truth, photometric realism, illumination diversity, or large-scale coverage. In this paper, we introduce MoonAnything, a unified benchmark built on real lunar topography with physically-based rendering, providing the first comprehensive geometric and photometric supervision under diverse illumination with large scale. The benchmark comprises two complementary sub-datasets : i) LunarGeo provides stereo images with corresponding dense depth maps and camera calibration enabling 3D reconstruction and pose estimation; ii) LunarPhoto provides photorealistic images using a spatially-varying BRDF model, along with multi-illumination renderings under real solar configurations, enabling reflectance estimation and illumination-robust perception. Together, these datasets offer over 130K samples with comprehensive supervision. Beyond lunar applications, MoonAnything offers a unique setting and challenging testbed for algorithms under low-textured, high-contrast conditions and applies to other airless celestial bodies and could generalize beyond. We establish baselines using state-of-the-art methods and release the complete dataset along with generation tools to support community extension: https://github.com/clementinegrethen/MoonAnything.

comment: Accepted to ACM MMSys 2026

☆ CL-VISTA: Benchmarking Continual Learning in Video Large Language Models

Haiyang Guo, Yichen Shi, Fei Zhu, Wenzhuo Liu, Hongbo Zhao, Fanhu Zeng, Shijie Ma, Da-Han Wang, Xu-Yao Zhang

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) require continual learning to adapt to non-stationary real-world data. However, existing benchmarks fall short of evaluating modern foundation models: many still rely on models without large-scale pre-training, and prevailing benchmarks typically partition a single dataset into sub-tasks, resulting in high task redundancy and negligible forgetting on pre-trained Video-LLMs. To address these limitations, we propose CL-VISTA, a benchmark tailored for continual video understanding of Video-LLMs. By curating 8 diverse tasks spanning perception, understanding, and reasoning, CL-VISTA induces substantial distribution shifts that effectively expose catastrophic forgetting. To systematically assess CL methods, we establish a comprehensive evaluation framework comprising 6 distinct protocols across 3 critical dimensions: performance, computational efficiency, and memory footprint. Notably, the performance dimension incorporates a general video understanding assessment to assess whether CL methods genuinely enhance foundational intelligence or merely induce task-specific overfitting. Extensive benchmarking of 10 mainstream CL methods reveals a fundamental trade-off: no single approach achieves universal superiority across all dimensions. Methods that successfully mitigate catastrophic forgetting tend to compromise generalization or incur prohibitive computational and memory overheads. We hope CL-VISTA provides critical insights for advancing continual learning in multimodal foundation models.

comment: Preprint

☆ When AI and Experts Agree on Error: Intrinsic Ambiguity in Dermatoscopic Images

Loris Cino, Pier Luigi Mazzeo, Alessandro Martella, Giulia Radi, Renato Rossi, Cosimo Distante

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), into dermatological diagnosis demonstrates substantial clinical potential. While existing literature predominantly benchmarks algorithmic performance against human experts, our study adopts a novel perspective by investigating the intrinsic complexity of dermatoscopic images. Through rigorous experimentation with multiple CNN architectures, we isolated a subset of images systematically misclassified across all models-a phenomenon statistically proven to exceed random chance. To determine if these failures stem from algorithmic biases or inherent visual ambiguity, expert dermatologists independently evaluated these challenging cases alongside a control group. The results revealed a collapse in human diagnostic performance on the AI-misclassified images. First, agreement with ground-truth labels plummeted, with Cohen's kappa dropping to a mere 0.08 for the difficult images, compared to a 0.61 for the control group. Second, we observed a severe deterioration in expert consensus; inter-rater reliability among physicians fell from moderate concordance (Fleiss kappa = 0.456) on control images to only modest agreement (Fleiss kappa = 0.275) on difficult cases. We identified image quality as a primary driver of these dual systematic failures. To promote transparency and reproducibility, all data, code, and trained models have been made publicly available

☆ DirectFisheye-GS: Enabling Native Fisheye Input in Gaussian Splatting with Cross-View Joint Optimization CVPR 2026

Zhengxian Yang, Fei Xie, Xutao Xue, Rui Zhang, Taicheng Huang, Yang Liu, Mengqi Ji, Tao Yu

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled efficient 3D scene reconstruction from everyday images with real-time, high-fidelity rendering, greatly advancing VR/AR applications. Fisheye cameras, with their wider field of view (FOV), promise high-quality reconstructions from fewer inputs and have recently attracted much attention. However, since 3DGS relies on rasterization, most subsequent works involving fisheye camera inputs first undistort images before training, which introduces two problems: 1) Black borders at image edges cause information loss and negate the fisheye's large FOV advantage; 2) Undistortion's stretch-and-interpolate resampling spreads each pixel's value over a larger area, diluting detail density -- causes 3DGS overfitting these low-frequency zones, producing blur and floating artifacts. In this work, we integrate fisheye camera model into the original 3DGS framework, enabling native fisheye image input for training without preprocessing. Despite correct modeling, we observed that the reconstructed scenes still exhibit floaters at image edges: Distortion increases toward the periphery, and 3DGS's original per-iteration random-selecting-view optimization ignores the cross-view correlations of a Gaussian, leading to extreme shapes (e.g., oversized or elongated) that degrade reconstruction quality. To address this, we introduce a feature-overlap-driven cross-view joint optimization strategy that establishes consistent geometric and photometric constraints across views-a technique equally applicable to existing pinhole-camera-based pipelines. Our DirectFisheye-GS matches or surpasses state-of-the-art performance on public datasets.

comment: CVPR 2026

☆ LiPS: Lightweight Panoptic Segmentation for Resource-Constrained Robotics

Calvin Galagain, Martyna Poreba, François Goulette, Cyrill Stachniss

Panoptic segmentation is a key enabler for robotic perception, as it unifies semantic understanding with object-level reasoning. However, the increasing complexity of state-of-the-art models makes them unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained platforms such as mobile robots. We propose a novel approach called LiPS that addresses the challenge of efficient-to-compute panoptic segmentation with a lightweight design that retains query-based decoding while introducing a streamlined feature extraction and fusion pathway. It aims at providing a strong panoptic segmentation performance while substantially lowering the computational demands. Evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that LiPS attains accuracy comparable to much heavier baselines, while providing up to 4.5 higher throughput, measured in frames per second, and requiring nearly 6.8 times fewer computations. This efficiency makes LiPS a highly relevant bridge between modern panoptic models and real-world robotic applications.

comment: Submitted to IEEE ICIP 2026. Under review

☆ TALENT: Target-aware Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation CVPR26

Shuo Jin, Siyue Yu, Bingfeng Zhang, Chao Yao, Meiqin Liu, Jimin Xiao

Referring image segmentation aims to segment specific targets based on a natural text expression. Recently, parameter-efficient tuning (PET) has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, existing PET-based methods often suffer from the fact that visual features can't emphasize the text-referred target instance but activate co-category yet unrelated objects. We analyze and quantify this problem, terming it the `non-target activation' (NTA) issue. To address this, we propose a novel framework, TALENT, which utilizes target-aware efficient tuning for PET-based RIS. Specifically, we first propose a Rectified Cost Aggregator (RCA) to efficiently aggregate text-referred features. Then, to calibrate `NTA' into accurate target activation, we adopt a Target-aware Learning Mechanism (TLM), including contextual pairwise consistency learning and target-centric contrastive learning. The former uses the sentence-level text feature to achieve a holistic understanding of the referent and constructs a text-referred affinity map to optimize the semantic association of visual features. The latter further enhances target localization to discover the distinct instance while suppressing associations with other unrelated ones. The two objectives work in concert and address `NTA' effectively. Extensive evaluations show that TALENT outperforms existing methods across various metrics (e.g., 2.5\% mIoU gains on G-Ref val set). Our codes will be released at: https://github.com/Kimsure/TALENT.

comment: Accepted by CVPR26 Findings

☆ Fluently Lying: Adversarial Robustness Can Be Substrate-Dependent

Daye Kang, Hyeongboo Baek

The primary tools used to monitor and defend object detectors under adversarial attack assume that when accuracy degrades, detection count drops in tandem. This coupling was assumed, not measured. We report a counterexample observed on a single model: under standard PGD, EMS-YOLO, a spiking neural network (SNN) object detector, retains more than 70% of its detections while mAP collapses from 0.528 to 0.042. We term this count-preserving accuracy collapse Quality Corruption (QC), to distinguish it from the suppression that dominates untargeted evaluation. Across four SNN architectures and two threat models (l-infinity and l-2), QC appears only in one of the four detectors tested (EMS-YOLO). On this model, all five standard defense components fail to detect or mitigate QC, suggesting the defense ecosystem may rely on a shared assumption calibrated on a single substrate. These results provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence that adversarial failure modes can be substrate-dependent.

comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables

☆ KG-CMI: Knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction for medical visual question answering

Xianyao Zheng, Hong Yu, Hui Cui, Changming Sun, Xiangyu Li, Ran Su, Leyi Wei, Jia Zhou, Junbo Wang, Qiangguo Jin

Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is a crucial multimodal task in clinical decision support and telemedicine. Recent methods fail to fully leverage domain-specific medical knowledge, making it difficult to accurately associate lesion features in medical images with key diagnostic criteria. Additionally, classification-based approaches typically rely on predefined answer sets. Treating Med-VQA as a simple classification problem limits its ability to adapt to the diversity of free-form answers and may overlook detailed semantic information in those answers. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction (KG-CMI) framework, which consists of a fine-grained cross-modal feature alignment (FCFA) module, a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) module, a cross-modal interaction representation (CMIR) module, and a free-form answer enhanced multi-task learning (FAMT) module. The KG-CMI learns cross-modal feature representations for images and texts by effectively integrating professional medical knowledge through a graph, establishing associations between lesion features and disease knowledge. Moreover, FAMT leverages auxiliary knowledge from open-ended questions, improving the model's capability for open-ended Med-VQA. Experimental results demonstrate that KG-CMI outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three Med-VQA datasets, i.e., VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and OVQA. Additionally, we conduct interpretability experiments to further validate the framework's effectiveness.

☆ Towards Viewpoint-Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving with 3D Foundation Model Priors CVPR

Hiroki Hashimoto, Hiromichi Goto, Hiroyuki Sugai, Hiroshi Kera, Kazuhiko Kawamoto

Robust trajectory planning under camera viewpoint changes is important for scalable end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing models often depend heavily on the camera viewpoints seen during training. We investigate an augmentation-free approach that leverages geometric priors from a 3D foundation model. The method injects per-pixel 3D positions derived from depth estimates as positional embeddings and fuses intermediate geometric features through cross-attention. Experiments on the VR-Drive camera viewpoint perturbation benchmark show reduced performance degradation under most perturbation conditions, with clear improvements under pitch and height perturbations. Gains under longitudinal translation are smaller, suggesting that more viewpoint-agnostic integration is needed for robustness to camera viewpoint changes.

comment: Accepted at CVPR Workshop on Simulation for Autonomous Driving 2026

☆ HarassGuard: Detecting Harassment Behaviors in Social Virtual Reality with Vision-Language Models

Junhee Lee, Minseok Kim, Hwanjo Heo, Seungwon Woo, Jinwoo Kim

Social Virtual Reality (VR) platforms provide immersive social experiences but also expose users to serious risks of online harassment. Existing safety measures are largely reactive, while proactive solutions that detect harassment behavior during an incident often depend on sensitive biometric data, raising privacy concerns. In this paper, we present HarassGuard, a vision-language model (VLM) based system that detects physical harassment in social VR using only visual input. We construct an IRB-approved harassment vision dataset, apply prompt engineering, and fine-tune VLMs to detect harassment behavior by considering contextual information in social VR. Experimental results demonstrate that HarassGuard achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines (i.e., LSTM/CNN, Transformer), reaching an accuracy of up to 88.09% in binary classification and 68.85% in multi-class classification. Notably, HarassGuard matches these baselines while using significantly fewer fine-tuning samples (200 vs. 1,115), offering unique advantages in contextual reasoning and privacy-preserving detection.

comment: To appear in the 2026 TVCG Special Issue on the 2026 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)

☆ FecalFed: Privacy-Preserving Poultry Disease Detection via Federated Learning CVPR 2026

Tien-Yu Chi

Early detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and endemic poultry diseases is critical for global food security. While computer vision models excel at classifying diseases from fecal imaging, deploying these systems at scale is bottlenecked by farm data privacy concerns and institutional data silos. Furthermore, existing open-source agricultural datasets frequently suffer from severe, undocumented data contamination. In this paper, we introduce $\textbf{FecalFed}$, a privacy-preserving federated learning framework for poultry disease classification. We first curate and release $\texttt{poultry-fecal-fl}$, a rigorously deduplicated dataset of 8,770 unique images across four disease classes, revealing and eliminating a 46.89$\%$ duplication rate in popular public repositories. To simulate realistic agricultural environments, we evaluate FecalFed under highly heterogeneous, non-IID conditions (Dirichlet $α=0.5$). While isolated single-farm training collapses under this data heterogeneity, yielding only 64.86$\%$ accuracy, our federated approach recovers performance without centralizing sensitive data. Specifically, utilizing server-side adaptive optimization (FedAdam) with a Swin-Small architecture achieves 90.31$\%$ accuracy, closely approaching the centralized upper bound of 95.10\%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that an edge-optimized Swin-Tiny model maintains highly competitive performance at 89.74$\%$, establishing a highly efficient, privacy-first blueprint for on-farm avian disease monitoring.

comment: Accepted to the CVPR 2026 Workshop on Vision for Agriculture

☆ STAR: Mitigating Cascading Errors in Spatial Reasoning via Turn-point Alignment and Segment-level DPO ICME 2026

Pukun Zhao, Longxiang Wang, Chen Chen, Peicheng Wang, Fanqing Zhou, Runze Li, Haojian Huang

Structured spatial navigation is a core benchmark for Large Language Models (LLMs) spatial reasoning. Existing paradigms like Visualization-of-Thought (VoT) are prone to cascading errors in complex topologies. To solve this, we propose STAR, a two-stage framework grounded on topological anchors, and introduce the RedMaze-23K dataset with human-inspired turnpoint annotations. The first stage uses supervised fine-tuning to help models internalize spatial semantics and prune redundant paths. The second adopts Spatial-aware Segment-level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO) to refine self-correction in long-horizon navigation. Experiments show STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models: its 32B variant outperforms DeepSeek-V3 (29.27% vs. 25.00%) and reaches 82.4% of GPT-4's performance.

comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, Accepted by ICME 2026

☆ Multi-Camera View Scaling for Data-Efficient Robot Imitation Learning

Yichen Xie, Yixiao Wang, Shuqi Zhao, Cheng-En Wu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Jianwen Xie, Hao-Shu Fang

The generalization ability of imitation learning policies for robotic manipulation is fundamentally constrained by the diversity of expert demonstrations, while collecting demonstrations across varied environments is costly and difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a practical framework that exploits inherent scene diversity without additional human effort by scaling camera views during demonstration collection. Instead of acquiring more trajectories, multiple synchronized camera perspectives are used to generate pseudo-demonstrations from each expert trajectory, which enriches the training distribution and improves viewpoint invariance in visual representations. We analyze how different action spaces interact with view scaling and show that camera-space representations further enhance diversity. In addition, we introduce a multiview action aggregation method that allows single-view policies to benefit from multiple cameras during deployment. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate significant gains in data efficiency and generalization compared to single-view baselines. Our results suggest that scaling camera views provides a practical and scalable solution for imitation learning, which requires minimal additional hardware setup and integrates seamlessly with existing imitation learning algorithms. The website of our project is https://yichen928.github.io/robot_multiview.

☆ TF-SSD: A Strong Pipeline via Synergic Mask Filter for Training-free Co-salient Object Detection CVPR26

Zhijin He, Shuo Jin, Siyue Yu, Shuwei Wu, Bingfeng Zhang, Li Yu, Jimin Xiao

Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims to segment salient objects that consistently appear across a group of related images. Despite the notable progress achieved by recent training-based approaches, they still remain constrained by the closed-set datasets and exhibit limited generalization. However, few studies explore the potential of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to address CoSOD, which demonstrate a strong generalized ability and robust saliency understanding. In this paper, we investigate and leverage VFMs for CoSOD, and further propose a novel training-free method, TF-SSD, through the synergy between SAM and DINO. Specifically, we first utilize SAM to generate comprehensive raw proposals, which serve as a candidate mask pool. Then, we introduce a quality mask generator to filter out redundant masks, thereby acquiring a refined mask set. Since this generator is built upon SAM, it inherently lacks semantic understanding of saliency. To this end, we adopt an intra-image saliency filter that employs DINO's attention maps to identify visually salient masks within individual images. Moreover, to extend saliency understanding across group images, we propose an inter-image prototype selector, which computes similarity scores among cross-image prototypes to select masks with the highest score. These selected masks serve as final predictions for CoSOD. Extensive experiments show that our TF-SSD outperforms existing methods (e.g., 13.7\% gains over the recent training-free method). Codes are available at https://github.com/hzz-yy/TF-SSD.

comment: Accepted by CVPR26

☆ Reliev3R: Relieving Feed-forward Reconstruction from Multi-View Geometric Annotations CVPR2026

Youyu Chen, Junjun Jiang, Yueru Luo, Kui Jiang, Xianming Liu, Xu Yan, Dave Zhenyu Chen

With recent advances, Feed-forward Reconstruction Models (FFRMs) have demonstrated great potential in reconstruction quality and adaptiveness to multiple downstream tasks. However, the excessive reliance on multi-view geometric annotations, e.g. 3D point maps and camera poses, makes the fully-supervised training scheme of FFRMs difficult to scale up. In this paper, we propose Reliev3R, a weakly-supervised paradigm for training FFRMs from scratch without cost-prohibitive multi-view geometric annotations. Relieving the reliance on geometric sensory data and compute-exhaustive structure-from-motion preprocessing, our method draws 3D knowledge directly from monocular relative depths and image sparse correspondences given by zero-shot predictions of pretrained models. At the core of Reliev3R, we design an ambiguity-aware relative depth loss and a trigonometry-based reprojection loss to facilitate supervision for multi-view geometric consistency. Training from scratch with the less data, Reliev3R catches up with its fully-supervised sibling models, taking a step towards low-cost 3D reconstruction supervisions and scalable FFRMs.

comment: Accepted by CVPR2026

☆ Neuropsychiatric Deviations From Normative Profiles: An MRI-Derived Marker for Early Alzheimer's Disease Detection

Synne Hjertager Osenbroch, Lisa Ramona Rosvold, Yao Lu, Alvaro Fernandez-Quilez

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) such as depression and apathy are common in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and often precede cognitive decline. NPS assessments hold promise as early detection markers due to their correlation with disease progression and their non-invasive nature. Yet current tools cannot distinguish whether NPS are part of aging or early signs of AD, limiting their utility. We present a deep learning-based normative modelling framework to identify atypical NPS burden from structural MRI. A 3D convolutional neural network was trained on cognitively stable participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, learning the mapping between brain anatomy and Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire (NPIQ) scores. Deviations between predicted and observed scores defined the Divergence from NPIQ scores (DNPI). Higher DNPI was associated with future AD conversion (adjusted OR=2.5; p < 0.01) and achieved predictive accuracy comparable to cerebrospinal fluid AB42 (AUC=0.74 vs 0.75). Our approach supports scalable, non-invasive strategies for early AD detection.

comment: Accepted and to be presented (ORAL) in ISBI 2026

♻ ☆ SA-CycleGAN-2.5D: Self-Attention CycleGAN with Tri-Planar Context for Multi-Site MRI Harmonization

Ishrith Gowda, Chunwei Liu

Multi-site neuroimaging analysis is fundamentally confounded by scanner-induced covariate shifts, where the marginal distribution of voxel intensities $P(\mathbf{x})$ varies non-linearly across acquisition protocols while the conditional anatomy $P(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{x})$ remains constant. This is particularly detrimental to radiomic reproducibility, where acquisition variance often exceeds biological pathology variance. Existing statistical harmonization methods (e.g., ComBat) operate in feature space, precluding spatial downstream tasks, while standard deep learning approaches are theoretically bounded by local effective receptive fields (ERF), failing to model the global intensity correlations characteristic of field-strength bias. We propose SA-CycleGAN-2.5D, a domain adaptation framework motivated by the $HΔH$-divergence bound of Ben-David et al., integrating three architectural innovations: (1) A 2.5D tri-planar manifold injection preserving through-plane gradients $\nabla_z$ at $O(HW)$ complexity; (2) A U-ResNet generator with dense voxel-to-voxel self-attention, surpassing the $O(\sqrt{L})$ receptive field limit of CNNs to model global scanner field biases; and (3) A spectrally-normalized discriminator constraining the Lipschitz constant ($K_D \le 1$) for stable adversarial optimization. Evaluated on 654 glioma patients across two institutional domains (BraTS and UPenn-GBM), our method reduces Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) by 99.1% ($1.729 \to 0.015$) and degrades domain classifier accuracy to near-chance (59.7%). Ablation confirms that global attention is statistically essential (Cohen's $d = 1.32$, $p < 0.001$) for the harder heterogeneous-to-homogeneous translation direction. By bridging 2D efficiency and 3D consistency, our framework yields voxel-level harmonized images that preserve tumor pathophysiology, enabling reproducible multi-center radiomic analysis.

comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to MICCAI 2026

♻ ☆ Processing and acquisition traces in visual encoders: What does CLIP know about your camera? ICCV 2025

Ryan Ramos, Vladan Stojnić, Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos, Yuta Nakashima, Giorgos Tolias, Noa Garcia

Prior work has analyzed the robustness of visual encoders to image transformations and corruptions, particularly in cases where such alterations are not seen during training. When this occurs, they introduce a form of distribution shift at test time, often leading to performance degradation. The primary focus has been on severe corruptions that, when applied aggressively, distort useful signals necessary for accurate semantic predictions. We take a different perspective by analyzing parameters of the image acquisition process and transformations that may be subtle or even imperceptible to the human eye. We find that such parameters are systematically encoded in the learned visual representations and can be easily recovered. More strikingly, their presence can have a profound impact, either positively or negatively, on semantic predictions. This effect depends on whether there is a strong correlation or anti-correlation between semantic labels and these acquisition-based or processing-based labels. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/ryan-caesar-ramos/visual-encoder-traces

comment: 8 main pages, supplementary attached, ICCV 2025 highlight

♻ ☆ ActErase: A Training-Free Paradigm for Precise Concept Erasure via Activation Redirection

Yi Sun, Xinhao Zhong, Hongyan Li, Yimin Zhou, Junhao Li, Bin Chen, Xuan Wang

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generation capabilities, yet they raise significant concerns regarding safety, copyright, and ethical implications. Existing concept erasure methods address these risks by removing sensitive concepts from pre-trained models, but most of them rely on data-intensive and computationally expensive fine-tuning, which poses a critical limitation. To overcome these challenges, inspired by the observation that the model's activations are predominantly composed of generic concepts, with only a minimal component can represent the target concept, we propose a novel training-free method (ActErase) for efficient concept erasure. Specifically, the proposed method operates by identifying activation difference regions via prompt-pair analysis, extracting target activations and dynamically replacing input activations during forward passes. Comprehensive evaluations across three critical erasure tasks (nudity, artistic style, and object removal) demonstrates that our training-free method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) erasure performance, while effectively preserving the model's overall generative capability. Our approach also exhibits strong robustness against adversarial attacks, establishing a new plug-and-play paradigm for lightweight yet effective concept manipulation in diffusion models.

♻ ☆ LG-HCC: Local Geometry-Aware Hierarchical Context Compression for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Xuan Deng, Xiandong Meng, Hengyu Man, Qiang Zhu, Tiange Zhang, Debin Zhao, Xiaopeng Fan

Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity real-time rendering, its prohibitive storage overhead severely hinders practical deployment. Recent anchor-based 3DGS compression schemes reduce gaussian redundancy through some advanced context models. However, they overlook explicit geometric dependencies, leading to structural degradation and suboptimal ratedistortion performance. In this paper, we propose a Local Geometry-aware Hierarchical Context Compression framework for 3DGS(LG-HCC) that incorporates inter-anchor geometric correlations into anchor pruning and entropy coding for compact representation. Specifically, we introduce an Neighborhood-Aware Anchor Pruning (NAAP) strategy, which evaluates anchor importance via weighted neighborhood feature aggregation and then merges low-contribution anchors into salient neighbors, yielding a compact yet geometry-consistent anchor set. Moreover, we further develop a hierarchical entropy coding scheme, in which coarse-to-fine priors are exploited through a lightweight Geometry-Guided Convolution(GG-Conv) operator to enable spatially adaptive context modeling and rate-distortion optimization. Extensive experiments show that LG-HCC effectively alleviates structural preservation issues,achieving superior geometric integrity and rendering fidelity while reducing storage by up to 30.85x compared to the Scaffold-GS baseline on the Mip-NeRF360 dataset

comment: 10

♻ ☆ VMAD: Visual-enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Yu Kang

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) recognizes and localizes anomalies in previously unseen objects by establishing feature mapping between textual prompts and inspection images, demonstrating excellent research value in flexible industrial manufacturing. However, existing ZSAD methods are limited by closed-world settings, struggling to unseen defects with predefined prompts. Recently, adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) presents a viable solution. Unlike fixed-prompt methods, MLLMs exhibit a generative paradigm with open-ended text interpretation, enabling more adaptive anomaly analysis. However, this adaption faces inherent challenges as anomalies often manifest in fine-grained regions and exhibit minimal visual discrepancies from normal samples. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework VMAD (Visual-enhanced MLLM Anomaly Detection) that enhances MLLM with visual-based IAD knowledge and fine-grained perception, simultaneously providing precise detection and comprehensive analysis of anomalies. Specifically, we design a Defect-Sensitive Structure Learning scheme that transfers patch-similarities cues from visual branch to our MLLM for improved anomaly discrimination. Besides, we introduce a novel visual projector, Locality-enhanced Token Compression, which mines multi-level features in local contexts to enhance fine-grained detection. Furthermore, we introduce the Real Industrial Anomaly Detection (RIAD), a comprehensive IAD dataset with detailed anomaly descriptions and analyses, offering a valuable resource for MLLM-based IAD development. Extensive experiments on zero-shot benchmarks, including MVTec-AD, Visa, WFDD, and RIAD datasets, demonstrate our superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be available soon.

♻ ☆ Unregistered Spectral Image Fusion: Unmixing, Adversarial Learning, and Recoverability

Jiahui Song, Sagar Shrestha, Xiao Fu

This paper addresses the fusion of a pair of spatially unregistered hyperspectral image (HSI) and multispectral image (MSI) covering roughly overlapping regions. HSIs offer high spectral but low spatial resolution, while MSIs provide the opposite. The goal is to integrate their complementary information to enhance both HSI spatial resolution and MSI spectral resolution. While hyperspectral-multispectral fusion (HMF) has been widely studied, the unregistered setting remains challenging. Many existing methods focus solely on MSI super-resolution, leaving HSI unchanged. Supervised deep learning approaches were proposed for HSI super-resolution, but rely on accurate training data, which is often unavailable. Moreover, theoretical analyses largely address the co-registered case, leaving unregistered HMF poorly understood. In this work, an unsupervised framework is proposed to simultaneously super-resolve both MSI and HSI. The method integrates coupled spectral unmixing for MSI super-resolution with latent-space adversarial learning for HSI super-resolution. Theoretical guarantees on the recoverability of the super-resolution MSI and HSI are established under reasonable generative models -- providing, to our best knowledge, the first such insights for unregistered HMF. The approach is validated on semi-real and real HSI-MSI pairs across diverse conditions.

♻ ☆ Spatial Reasoning is Not a Free Lunch: A Controlled Study on LLaVA ICLR 2026

Nahid Alam, Leema Krishna Murali, Siddhant Bharadwaj, Patrick Liu, Timothy Chung, Drishti Sharma, Akshata A., Kranthi Kiran, Wesley Tam, Bala Krishna S Vegesna

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet they still struggle with basic spatial reasoning. Despite strong performance on general benchmarks, modern VLMs remain brittle at understanding 2D spatial relationships such as relative position, layout, and counting. We argue that this failure is not merely a data problem, but is closely tied to dominant design choices in current VLM pipelines: reliance on CLIP-style image encoders and the flattening of images into 1D token sequences with 1D positional encoding. We present a controlled diagnostic study within the LLaVA framework to isolate how these choices affect spatial grounding. We evaluate frontier models and LLaVA variants on a suite of spatial benchmarks, comparing CLIP-based encoders against alternatives trained with denser or generative objectives, as well as variants augmented with 2D positional encoding. Our results show consistent spatial performance gaps across models, and indicate that encoder objectives and positional structure shape spatial behavior, but do not fully resolve it.

comment: Accepted as a poster at ICLR 2026 workshop ICBINB, typo fixed

♻ ☆ TeFlow: Enabling Multi-frame Supervision for Self-Supervised Feed-forward Scene Flow Estimation CVPR 2026

Qingwen Zhang, Chenhan Jiang, Xiaomeng Zhu, Yunqi Miao, Yushan Zhang, Olov Andersson, Patric Jensfelt

Self-supervised feed-forward methods for scene flow estimation offer real-time efficiency, but their supervision from two-frame point correspondences is unreliable and often breaks down under occlusions. Multi-frame supervision has the potential to provide more stable guidance by incorporating motion cues from past frames, yet naive extensions of two-frame objectives are ineffective because point correspondences vary abruptly across frames, producing inconsistent signals. In the paper, we present TeFlow, enabling multi-frame supervision for feed-forward models by mining temporally consistent supervision. TeFlow introduces a temporal ensembling strategy that forms reliable supervisory signals by aggregating the most temporally consistent motion cues from a candidate pool built across multiple frames. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that TeFlow establishes a new state-of-the-art for self-supervised feed-forward methods, achieving performance gains of up to 33\% on the challenging Argoverse 2 and nuScenes datasets. Our method performs on par with leading optimization-based methods, yet speeds up 150 times. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Kin-Zhang/TeFlow along with trained model weights.

comment: CVPR 2026; 16 pages, 8 figures

♻ ☆ Object Affordance Recognition and Grounding via Multi-scale Cross-modal Representation Learning

Xinhang Wan, Dongqiang Gou, Xinwang Liu, En Zhu, Xuming He

A core problem of Embodied AI is to learn object manipulation from observation, as humans do. To achieve this, it is important to localize 3D object affordance areas through observation such as images (3D affordance grounding) and understand their functionalities (affordance classification). Previous attempts usually tackle these two tasks separately, leading to inconsistent predictions due to lacking proper modeling of their dependency. In addition, these methods typically only ground the incomplete affordance areas depicted in images, failing to predict the full potential affordance areas, and operate at a fixed scale, resulting in difficulty in coping with affordances significantly varying in scale with respect to the whole object. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that learns an affordance-aware 3D representation and employs a stage-wise inference strategy leveraging the dependency between grounding and classification tasks. Specifically, we first develop a cross-modal 3D representation through efficient fusion and multi-scale geometric feature propagation, enabling inference of full potential affordance areas at a suitable regional scale. Moreover, we adopt a simple two-stage prediction mechanism, effectively coupling grounding and classification for better affordance understanding. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing improved performance in both affordance grounding and classification.

♻ ☆ RefTon: Reference person shot assist virtual Try-on CVPR 2026

Liuzhuozheng Li, Yue Gong, Shanyuan Liu, Bo Cheng, Yuhang Ma, Leibucha Wu, Dengyang Jiang, Zanyi Wang, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin

We introduce RefTon, a flux-based person-to-person virtual try-on framework that enhances garment realism through unpaired visual references. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on complex auxiliary inputs such as body parsing and warped mask or require finely designed extract branches to process various input conditions, RefTon streamlines the process by directly generating try-on results from a source image and a target garment, without the need for structural guidance or auxiliary components to handle diverse inputs. Moreover, inspired by human clothing selection behavior, RefTon leverages additional reference images (the target garment worn on different individuals) to provide powerful guidance for refining texture alignment and maintaining the garment details. To enable this capability, we built a dataset containing unpaired reference images for training. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that RefTon achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining a simple and efficient person-to-person design.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Beyond the Ground Truth: Enhanced Supervision for Image Restoration CVPR 2026

Donghun Ryou, Inju Ha, Sanghyeok Chu, Bohyung Han

Deep learning-based image restoration has achieved significant success. However, when addressing real-world degradations, model performance is limited by the quality of groundtruth images in datasets due to practical constraints in data acquisition. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that enhances existing ground truth images to provide higher-quality supervision for real-world restoration. Our framework generates perceptually enhanced ground truth images using super-resolution by incorporating adaptive frequency masks, which are learned by a conditional frequency mask generator. These masks guide the optimal fusion of frequency components from the original ground truth and its super-resolved variants, yielding enhanced ground truth images. This frequency-domain mixup preserves the semantic consistency of the original content while selectively enriching perceptual details, preventing hallucinated artifacts that could compromise fidelity. The enhanced ground truth images are used to train a lightweight output refinement network that can be seamlessly integrated with existing restoration models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of restored images. We further validate the effectiveness of both supervision enhancement and output refinement through user studies.

comment: Project page: https://hij1112.github.io/beyond-the-ground-truth/ Accepted to CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Next-Scale Prediction: A Self-Supervised Approach for Real-World Image Denoising

Yiwen Shan, Haiyu Zhao, Peng Hu, Xi Peng, Yuanbiao Gou

Self-supervised real-world image denoising remains a fundamental challenge, arising from the antagonistic trade-off between decorrelating spatially structured noise and preserving high-frequency details. Existing blind-spot network (BSN) methods rely on pixel-shuffle downsampling (PD) to decorrelate noise, but aggressive downsampling fragments fine structures, while milder downsampling fails to remove correlated noise. To address this, we introduce Next-Scale Prediction (NSP), a novel self-supervised paradigm that decouples noise decorrelation from detail preservation. NSP constructs cross-scale training pairs, where BSN takes low-resolution, fully decorrelated sub-images as input to predict high-resolution targets that retain fine details. As a by-product, NSP naturally supports super-resolution of noisy images without retraining or modification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NSP achieves state-of-the-art self-supervised denoising performance on real-world benchmarks, significantly alleviating the long-standing conflict between noise decorrelation and detail preservation. The code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2026-CVPR-NSP.

♻ ☆ Pulp Motion: Framing-aware multimodal camera and human motion generation

Robin Courant, Xi Wang, David Loiseaux, Marc Christie, Vicky Kalogeiton

Treating human motion and camera trajectory generation separately overlooks a core principle of cinematography: the tight interplay between actor performance and camera work in the screen space. In this paper, we are the first to cast this task as a text-conditioned joint generation, aiming to maintain consistent on-screen framing while producing two heterogeneous, yet intrinsically linked, modalities: human motion and camera trajectories. We propose a simple, model-agnostic framework that enforces multimodal coherence via an auxiliary modality: the on-screen framing induced by projecting human joints onto the camera. This on-screen framing provides a natural and effective bridge between modalities, promoting consistency and leading to more precise joint distribution. We first design a joint autoencoder that learns a shared latent space, together with a lightweight linear transform from the human and camera latents to a framing latent. We then introduce auxiliary sampling, which exploits this linear transform to steer generation toward a coherent framing modality. To support this task, we also introduce the PulpMotion dataset, a human-motion and camera-trajectory dataset with rich captions, and high-quality human motions. Extensive experiments across DiT- and MAR-based architectures show the generality and effectiveness of our method in generating on-frame coherent human-camera motions, while also achieving gains on textual alignment for both modalities. Our qualitative results yield more cinematographically meaningful framings setting the new state of the art for this task. Code, models and data are available in our \href{https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/vista/projects/2025_pulpmotion_courant/}{project page}.

comment: Project page: https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/vista/projects/2025_pulpmotion_courant/

♻ ☆ EagleNet: Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network for Text-Video Retrieval CVPR 2026

Yuhan Chen, Pengwen Dai, Chuan Wang, Dayan Wu, Xiaochun Cao

Text-video retrieval tasks have seen significant improvements due to the recent development of large-scale vision-language pre-trained models. Traditional methods primarily focus on video representations or cross-modal alignment, while recent works shift toward enriching text expressiveness to better match the rich semantics in videos. However, these methods use only interactions between text and frames/video, and ignore rich interactions among the internal frames within a video, so the final expanded text cannot capture frame contextual information, leading to disparities between text and video. In response, we introduce Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network (EagleNet) to generate accurate and context-aware enriched text embeddings. Specifically, the proposed Fine-Grained Relationship Learning mechanism (FRL) first constructs a text-frame graph by the generated text candidates and frames, then learns relationships among texts and frames, which are finally used to aggregate text candidates into an enriched text embedding that incorporates frame contextual information. To further improve fine-grained relationship learning in FRL, we design Energy-Aware Matching (EAM) to model the energy of text-frame interactions and thus accurately capture the distribution of real text-video pairs. Moreover, for more effective cross-modal alignment and stable training, we replace the conventional softmax-based contrastive loss with the sigmoid loss. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of EagleNet across MSRVTT, DiDeMo, MSVD, and VATEX. Codes are available at https://github.com/draym28/EagleNet.

comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Le MuMo JEPA: Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Representation Learning with Learnable Fusion Tokens CVPR 2026

Ciem Cornelissen, Sam Leroux, Pieter Simoens

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning visual representations without manual annotations, yet most methods still operate on a single modality and therefore miss the complementary structure available from heterogeneous sensors. We present Le MuMo JEPA, a self-supervised framework that learns unified representations from RGB images and aligned companion modalities. In our driving experiments, the second modality is camera-aligned LiDAR depth; we also evaluate RGB-thermal training and transfer on the Teledyne FLIR ADAS benchmark. Our approach extends LeJEPA to the multi-modal setting by learning fusion tokens that act as a latent bottleneck between modality-specific patch stems inside a shared transformer. Our default model employs a pruned fusion strategy: after an initial cross-modal attention layer, modality-specific tokens are dropped, forcing cross-modal information into the shared fusion-token grid as an efficient latent bottleneck before Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) is applied to the joint multimodal CLS embedding. On Waymo, Le MuMo JEPA gives the strongest performance-efficiency trade-off on downstream patch probes among the from-scratch multimodal baselines, improving CenterNet detection and dense depth while remaining competitive on segmentation. Under from-scratch training on nuScenes, Le MuMo JEPA remains the strongest model, and it also gives the best FLIR results, especially after Waymo-initialized fine-tuning. It also retains the best overall accuracy-efficiency balance in our study at substantially lower compute, memory, and estimated training time.

comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, supplementary material. Accepted at the CVPR 2026 Workshop on Unified Robotic Vision with Cross-Modal Sensing and Alignment (URVIS)

♻ ☆ CDH-Bench: A Commonsense-Driven Hallucination Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Fidelity in Vision-Language Models

Kesheng Chen, Yamin Hu, Qi Zhou, Zhenqian Zhu, Wenjian Luo

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many benchmarks, yet a basic reliability question remains underexplored: when visual evidence conflicts with commonsense, do models follow what is shown or what commonsense suggests? A characteristic failure in this setting is that the model overrides visual evidence and outputs the commonsense alternative. We term this phenomenon \textbf{commonsense-driven hallucination} (CDH). To evaluate it, we introduce \textbf{CDH-Bench}, a benchmark designed to create explicit \textbf{visual evidence--commonsense conflicts}. CDH-Bench covers three dimensions: \textit{counting anomalies}, \textit{relational anomalies}, and \textit{attribute anomalies}. We evaluate frontier VLMs under \textit{binary Question Answering (QA)} and \textit{multiple-choice QA}, and report metrics including \textit{Counterfactual Accuracy} (CF-Acc), \textit{Commonsense Accuracy} (CS-Acc), \textit{Counterfactual Accuracy Drop} (CFAD), \textit{Commonsense Collapse Rate} (CCR), and \textit{Relative Prior Dependency} (RPD). Results show that even strong models remain vulnerable to prior-driven normalization under visual evidence--commonsense conflict. CDH-Bench provides a controlled diagnostic of visual fidelity under visual evidence--commonsense conflict.

♻ ☆ TempoControl: Temporal Attention Guidance for Text-to-Video Models CVPR'26

Shira Schiber, Ofir Lindenbaum, Idan Schwartz

Recent advances in generative video models have enabled the creation of high-quality videos based on natural language prompts. However, these models frequently lack fine-grained temporal control, meaning they do not allow users to specify when particular visual elements should appear within a generated sequence. In this work, we introduce TempoControl, a method that allows for temporal alignment of visual concepts during inference, without requiring retraining or additional supervision. TempoControl utilizes cross-attention maps, a key component of text-to-video diffusion models, to guide the timing of concepts through a novel optimization approach. Our method steers attention using three complementary principles: aligning its temporal pattern with a control signal (correlation), adjusting its strength where visibility is required (magnitude), and preserving semantic consistency (entropy). TempoControl provides precise temporal control while maintaining high video quality and diversity. We demonstrate its effectiveness across various applications, including temporal reordering of single and multiple objects, action timing, and audio-aligned video generation. Project page: https://shira-schiber.github.io/TempoControl/.

comment: Accepted CVPR'26

♻ ☆ D4C: Data-Free Quantization for Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Models CVPR

Wenlun Zhang, Yunshan Zhong, Zihao Ding, Xinyu Li, Kentaro Yoshioka

Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) offers a practical solution for model compression without requiring access to real data, making it particularly attractive in privacy-sensitive scenarios. While DFQ has shown promise for unimodal models, its extension to Vision-Language Models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models remains underexplored. In this work, we reveal that directly applying existing DFQ techniques to CLIP results in substantial performance degradation due to two key limitations: insufficient semantic content and low intra-image diversity in synthesized samples. To tackle these challenges, we propose D4C, the first DFQ framework tailored for CLIP. D4C synthesizes semantically rich and structurally diverse pseudo images through three key components: 1) Prompt-Guided Semantic Injection aligns generated images with real-world semantics using text prompts; 2) Structural Contrastive Generation reproduces compositional structures of natural images by leveraging foreground-background contrastive synthesis; and 3) Perturbation-Aware Enhancement applies controlled perturbations to improve sample diversity and robustness. These components jointly empower D4C to synthesize images that are both semantically informative and structurally diverse, effectively bridging the performance gap of DFQ on CLIP. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of D4C, showing significant performance improvements on various bit-widths and models.

comment: Accepted to CVPRF 2026

♻ ☆ Variance-Based Pruning for Accelerating and Compressing Trained Networks ICCV'25

Uranik Berisha, Jens Mehnert, Alexandru Paul Condurache

Increasingly expensive training of ever larger models such as Vision Transfomers motivate reusing the vast library of already trained state-of-the-art networks. However, their latency, high computational costs and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment, especially on resource-constrained hardware. While structured pruning methods can reduce these factors, they often require costly retraining, sometimes for up to hundreds of epochs, or even training from scratch to recover the lost accuracy resulting from the structural modifications. Maintaining the provided performance of trained models after structured pruning and thereby avoiding extensive retraining remains a challenge. To solve this, we introduce Variance-Based Pruning, a simple and structured one-shot pruning technique for efficiently compressing networks, with minimal finetuning. Our approach first gathers activation statistics, which are used to select neurons for pruning. Simultaneously the mean activations are integrated back into the model to preserve a high degree of performance. On ImageNet-1k recognition tasks, we demonstrate that directly after pruning DeiT-Base retains over 70% of its original performance and requires only 10 epochs of fine-tuning to regain 99% of the original accuracy while simultaneously reducing MACs by 35% and model size by 36%, thus speeding up the model by 1.44x. The code is available at: https://github.com/boschresearch/variance-based-pruning

comment: Accepted as Oral at ICCV'25 (IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision)

♻ ☆ Vision Tiny Recursion Model (ViTRM): Parameter-Efficient Image Classification via Recursive State Refinement

Ange-Clément Akazan, Abdoulaye Koroko, Verlon Roel Mbingui, Choukouriyah Arinloye, Hassan Fifen, Rose Bandolo

The success of deep learning in computer vision has been driven by models of increasing scale, from deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to large Vision Transformers (ViT). While effective, these architectures are parameter-intensive and demand significant computational resources, limiting deployment in resource-constrained environments. Inspired by Tiny Recursive Models (TRM), which show that small recursive networks can solve complex reasoning tasks through iterative state refinement, we introduce the \textbf{Vision Tiny Recursion Model (ViTRM)}: a parameter-efficient architecture that replaces the $L$-layer ViT encoder with a single tiny $k$-layer block ($k{=}3$) applied recursively $N$ times. Despite using up to $6 \times $ and $84 \times$ fewer parameters than CNN based models and ViT respectively, ViTRM maintains competitive performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. This demonstrates that recursive computation is a viable, parameter-efficient alternative to architectural depth in vision.

♻ ☆ CHEEM: Continual Learning by Reuse, New, Adapt and Skip -- A Hierarchical Exploration-Exploitation Approach CVPR 2026

Chinmay Savadikar, Michelle Dai, Tianfu Wu

To effectively manage the complexities of real-world dynamic environments, continual learning must incrementally acquire, update, and accumulate knowledge from a stream of tasks of different nature without suffering from catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge. While this capability is innate to human cognition, it remains a significant challenge for modern deep learning systems. At the heart of this challenge lies the stability-plasticity dilemma: the need to balance leveraging prior knowledge, integrating novel information, and allocating model capacity adaptively based on task complexity and synergy. In this paper, we propose a novel exemplar-free class-incremental continual learning (ExfCCL) framework that addresses these issues through a Hierarchical Exploration-Exploitation (HEE) approach. The core of our method is a HEE-guided efficient neural architecture search (HEE-NAS) that enables a learning-to-adapt backbone via four primitive operations - reuse, new, adapt, and skip - thereby serving as an internal memory that dynamically updates selected components across streaming tasks. To address the task ID inference problem in ExfCCL, we exploit an external memory of task centroids proposed in the prior art. We term our method CHEEM (Continual Hierarchical-Exploration-Exploitation Memory). CHEEM is evaluated on the challenging MTIL and VDD benchmarks using both Tiny and Base Vision Transformers and a proposed holistic Figure-of-Merit (FoM) metric. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting-based continual learning methods, closely approaching full fine-tuning upper bounds. Furthermore, it learns adaptive model structures tailored to individual tasks in a semantically meaningful way. Our code is available at https://github.com/savadikarc/cheem .

comment: CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ OTPrune: Distribution-Aligned Visual Token Pruning via Optimal Transport CVPR2026

Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Gen Li, Xuanzhao Dong, Yujian Xiong, Hao Wang, Peijie Qiu, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Shao Tang, Yalin Wang, Abolfazl Razi

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong visual-language reasoning but suffer from high inference cost due to redundant visual tokens. Recent work explores visual token pruning to accelerate inference, while existing pruning methods overlook the underlying distributional structure of visual representations. We propose OTPrune, a training-free framework that formulates pruning as distribution alignment via optimal transport (OT). By minimizing the 2-Wasserstein distance between the full and pruned token distributions, OTPrune preserves both local diversity and global representativeness while reducing inference cost. Moreover, we derive a tractable submodular objective that enables efficient optimization, and theoretically prove its monotonicity and submodularity, providing a principled foundation for stable and efficient pruning. We further provide a comprehensive analysis that explains how distributional alignment contributes to stable and semantically faithful pruning. Comprehensive experiments on wider benchmarks demonstrate that OTPrune achieves superior performance-efficiency tradeoffs compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/OTPrune.

comment: Accepted by CVPR2026

♻ ☆ CLoD-GS: Continuous Level-of-Detail via 3D Gaussian Splatting ICLR 2026

Zhigang Cheng, Mingchao Sun, Yu Liu, Zengye Ge, Luyang Tang, Mu Xu, Yangyan Li, Peng Pan

Level of Detail (LoD) is a fundamental technique in real-time computer graphics for managing the rendering costs of complex scenes while preserving visual fidelity. Traditionally, LoD is implemented using discrete levels (DLoD), where multiple, distinct versions of a model are swapped out at different distances. This long-standing paradigm, however, suffers from two major drawbacks: it requires significant storage for multiple model copies and causes jarring visual ``popping" artifacts during transitions, degrading the user experience. We argue that the explicit, primitive-based nature of the emerging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) technique enables a more ideal paradigm: Continuous LoD (CLoD). A CLoD approach facilitates smooth, seamless quality scaling within a single, unified model, thereby circumventing the core problems of DLOD. To this end, we introduce CLoD-GS, a framework that integrates a continuous LoD mechanism directly into a 3DGS representation. Our method introduces a learnable, distance-dependent decay parameter for each Gaussian primitive, which dynamically adjusts its opacity based on viewpoint proximity. This allows for the progressive and smooth filtering of less significant primitives, effectively creating a continuous spectrum of detail within one model. To train this model to be robust across all distances, we introduce a virtual distance scaling mechanism and a novel coarse-to-fine training strategy with rendered point count regularization. Our approach not only eliminates the storage overhead and visual artifacts of discrete methods but also reduces the primitive count and memory footprint of the final model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLoD-GS achieves smooth, quality-scalable rendering from a single model, delivering high-fidelity results across a wide range of performance targets.

comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026 poster

♻ ☆ SHIFT: Stochastic Hidden-Trajectory Deflection for Removing Diffusion-based Watermark

Rui Bao, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

Diffusion-based watermarking methods embed verifiable marks by manipulating the initial noise or the reverse diffusion trajectory. However, these methods share a critical assumption: verification can succeed only if the diffusion trajectory can be faithfully reconstructed. This reliance on trajectory recovery constitutes a fundamental and exploitable vulnerability. We propose $\underline{\mathbf{S}}$tochastic $\underline{\mathbf{Hi}}$dden-Trajectory De$\underline{\mathbf{f}}$lec$\underline{\mathbf{t}}$ion ($\mathbf{SHIFT}$), a training-free attack that exploits this common weakness across diverse watermarking paradigms. SHIFT leverages stochastic diffusion resampling to deflect the generative trajectory in latent space, making the reconstructed image statistically decoupled from the original watermark-embedded trajectory while preserving strong visual quality and semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on nine representative watermarking methods spanning noise-space, frequency-domain, and optimization-based paradigms show that SHIFT achieves 95%--100% attack success rates with nearly no loss in semantic quality, without requiring any watermark-specific knowledge or model retraining.

♻ ☆ Can We Go Beyond Visual Features? Neural Tissue Relation Modeling for Relational Graph Analysis in Non-Melanoma Skin Histology CVPR 2026

Shravan Venkatraman, Muthu Subash Kavitha, Joe Dhanith P R, V Manikandarajan, Jia Wu

Histopathology image segmentation is essential for delineating tissue structures in skin cancer diagnostics, but modeling spatial context and inter-tissue relationships remains a challenge, especially in regions with overlapping or morphologically similar tissues. Current convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches operate primarily on visual texture, often treating tissues as independent regions and failing to encode biological context. To this end, we introduce Neural Tissue Relation Modeling (NTRM), a novel segmentation framework that augments CNNs with a tissue-level graph neural network to model spatial and functional relationships across tissue types. NTRM constructs a graph over predicted regions, propagates contextual information via message passing, and refines segmentation through spatial projection. Unlike prior methods, NTRM explicitly encodes inter-tissue dependencies, enabling structurally coherent predictions in boundary-dense zones. On the benchmark Histopathology Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer Segmentation Dataset, NTRM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a robust Dice similarity coefficient that is 4.9\% to 31.25\% higher than the best-performing models among the evaluated approaches. Our experiments indicate that relational modeling offers a principled path toward more context-aware and interpretable histological segmentation, compared to local receptive-field architectures that lack tissue-level structural awareness. Our code is available at https://github.com/shravan-18/NTRM.

comment: CVPR 2026 Workshops

♻ ☆ The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding

Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Quan Wang, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu

Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity within a single latent space, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we show that UAE can be directly applied to pixel-space modeling, significantly improving both FID and IS over the vanilla JIT baseline. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE.

comment: Code link: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE

♻ ☆ SurgTEMP: Temporal-Aware Surgical Video Question Answering with Text-guided Visual Memory for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Shi Li, Vinkle Srivastav, Nicolas Chanel, Saurav Sharma, Nabani Banik, Lorenzo Arboit, Kun Yuan, Pietro Mascagni, Nicolas Padoy

Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to well navigate evolving intraoperative scenes. Computer-assisted systems such as surgical visual question answering (VQA) offer promises for education and intraoperative support. Current surgical VQA research largely focuses on static frame analysis, overlooking rich temporal semantics. Surgical video question answering is further challenged by low visual contrast, its highly knowledge-driven nature, diverse analytical needs spanning scattered temporal windows, and the hierarchy from basic perception to high-level intraoperative assessment. To address these challenges, we propose SurgTEMP, a multimodal LLM framework featuring (i) a query-guided token selection module that builds hierarchical visual memory (spatial and temporal memory banks) and (ii) a Surgical Competency Progression (SCP) training scheme. Together, these components enable effective modeling of variable-length surgical videos while preserving procedure-relevant cues and temporal coherence, and better support diverse downstream assessment tasks. To support model development, we introduce CholeVidQA-32K, a surgical video question answering dataset comprising 32K open-ended QA pairs and 3,855 video segments (approximately 128 h total) from laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The dataset is organized into a three-level hierarchy -- Perception, Assessment, and Reasoning -- spanning 11 tasks from instrument/action/anatomy perception to Critical View of Safety (CVS), intraoperative difficulty, skill proficiency, and adverse event assessment. In comprehensive evaluations against state-of-the-art open-source multimodal and video LLMs (fine-tuned and zero-shot), SurgTEMP achieves substantial performance improvements, advancing the state of video-based surgical VQA.

comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, 9 tables

♻ ☆ Beyond the Golden Data: Resolving the Motion-Vision Quality Dilemma via Timestep Selective Training CVPR 2026

Xiangyang Luo, Qingyu Li, Yuming Li, Guanbo Huang, Yongjie Zhu, Wenyu Qin, Meng Wang, Pengfei Wan, Shao-Lun Huang

Recent advances in video generation models have achieved impressive results. However, these models heavily rely on the use of high-quality data that combines both high visual quality and high motion quality. In this paper, we identify a key challenge in video data curation: the Motion-Vision Quality Dilemma. We discovered that visual quality and motion intensity inherently exhibit a negative correlation, making it hard to obtain golden data that excels in both aspects. To address this challenge, we first examine the hierarchical learning dynamics of video diffusion models and conduct gradient-based analysis on quality-degraded samples. We discover that quality-imbalanced data can produce gradients similar to golden data at appropriate timesteps. Based on this, we introduce the novel concept of Timestep selection in Training Process. We propose Timestep-aware Quality Decoupling (TQD), which modifies the data sampling distribution to better match the model's learning process. For certain types of data, the sampling distribution is skewed toward higher timesteps for motion-rich data, while high visual quality data is more likely to be sampled during lower timesteps. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that TQD enables training exclusively on separated imbalanced data to achieve performance surpassing conventional training with better data, challenging the necessity of perfect data in video generation. Moreover, our method also boosts model performance when trained on high-quality data, showcasing its effectiveness across different data scenarios.

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Learning to Infer Parameterized Representations of Plants from 3D Scans

Samara Ghrer, Christophe Godin, Stefanie Wuhrer

Plants frequently contain numerous organs, organized in 3D branching systems defining the plant's architecture. Reconstructing the architecture of plants from unstructured observations is challenging because of self-occlusion and spatial proximity between organs, which are often thin structures. To achieve the challenging task, we propose an approach that allows to infer a parameterized representation of the plant's architecture from a given 3D scan of a plant. In addition to the plant's branching structure, this representation contains parametric information for each plant organ, and can therefore be used directly in a variety of tasks. In this data-driven approach, we train a recursive neural network with virtual plants generated using a procedural model. After training, the network allows to infer a parametric tree-like representation based on an input 3D point cloud. Our method is applicable to any plant that can be represented as binary axial tree. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on Chenopodium Album plants on reconstruction, segmentation and skeletonization, which are important problems in plant phenotyping. In addition to carrying out several tasks at once, our method achieves results on-par with strong baselines for each task. We apply our method, trained exclusively on synthetic data, to 3D scans and show that it generalizes well.

♻ ☆ HUMOF: Human Motion Forecasting in Interactive Social Scenes ICLR 2026

Caiyi Sun, Yujing Sun, Xiao Han, Zemin Yang, Jiawei Liu, Xinge Zhu, Siu Ming Yiu, Yuexin Ma

Complex scenes present significant challenges for predicting human behaviour due to the abundance of interaction information, such as human-human and humanenvironment interactions. These factors complicate the analysis and understanding of human behaviour, thereby increasing the uncertainty in forecasting human motions. Existing motion prediction methods thus struggle in these complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose an effective method for human motion forecasting in interactive scenes. To achieve a comprehensive representation of interactions, we design a hierarchical interaction feature representation so that high-level features capture the overall context of the interactions, while low-level features focus on fine-grained details. Besides, we propose a coarse-to-fine interaction reasoning module that leverages both spatial and frequency perspectives to efficiently utilize hierarchical features, thereby enhancing the accuracy of motion predictions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across four public datasets. The source code will be available at https://github.com/scy639/HUMOF.

comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ EoS-FM: Can an Ensemble of Specialist Models act as a Generalist Feature Extractor?

Pierre Adorni, Minh-Tan Pham, Stéphane May, Sébastien Lefèvre

Recent advances in foundation models have shown great promise in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision, and similar efforts are now emerging in the Earth Observation community. These models aim to generalize across tasks with limited supervision, reducing the need for training separate models for each task. However, current strategies, which largely focus on scaling model size and dataset volume, require prohibitive computational and data resources, limiting accessibility to only a few large institutions. Moreover, this paradigm of ever-larger models stands in stark contrast with the principles of sustainable and environmentally responsible AI, as it leads to immense carbon footprints and resource inefficiency. In this work, we present a novel and efficient alternative: an Ensemble-of-Specialists framework for building Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs). Our method decomposes the training process into lightweight, task-specific ConvNeXtV2 specialists that can be frozen and reused. This modular approach offers strong advantages in efficiency, interpretability, and extensibility. Moreover, it naturally supports federated training, pruning, and continuous specialist integration, making it particularly well-suited for collaborative and resource-constrained settings. Our framework sets a new direction for building scalable and efficient RSFMs. All codes and pretrained models are available on the public repo at https://github.com/pierreadorni/EoS-FM .

♻ ☆ WAON: Large-Scale Japanese Image-Text Pair Dataset for Improving Model Performance on Japanese Cultural Tasks

Issa Sugiura, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Oda, Daisuke Kawahara, Yasuo Okabe, Naoaki Okazaki

Contrastive pre-training on large-scale image-text pair datasets has driven major advances in vision-language representation learning. Recent work shows that pretraining on global data followed by language or culture specific fine-tuning is effective for improving performance in target domains. With the availability of strong open-weight multilingual models such as SigLIP2, this paradigm has become increasingly practical. However, for Japanese, the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality image-text pair datasets tailored to Japanese language and cultural content remains a key limitation. To address this gap, we introduce WAON, the largest Japanese image-text pair dataset constructed from Japanese web content in Common Crawl, containing approximately 155 million examples. Our dataset construction pipeline employs filtering and deduplication to improve dataset quality. To improve the quality and reliability of evaluation on Japanese cultural tasks, we also construct WAON-Bench, a manually curated benchmark for Japanese cultural image classification comprising 374 classes, which addresses issues in the existing benchmark such as category imbalance and label-image mismatches. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning on WAON improves model performance on Japanese cultural benchmarks more efficiently than existing datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results among publicly available models of comparable architecture. We release our dataset, model, and code.

comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

♻ ☆ Harnessing the Power of Local Representations for Few-Shot Classification

Shi Tang, Guiming Luo, Xinchen Ye, Zhiyi Xia

Generalizing to novel classes unseen during training is a key challenge of few-shot classification. Recent metric-based methods try to address this by local representations. However, they are unable to take full advantage of them due to (i) improper supervision for pretraining the feature extractor, and (ii) lack of adaptability in the metric for handling various possible compositions of local feature sets. In this work, we harness the power of local representations in improving novel-class generalization. For the feature extractor, we design a novel pretraining paradigm that learns randomly cropped patches by soft labels. It utilizes the class-level diversity of patches while diminishing the impact of their semantic misalignments to hard labels. To align network output with soft labels, we also propose a UniCon KL-Divergence that emphasizes the equal contribution of each base class in describing "non-base" patches. For the metric, we formulate measuring local feature sets as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem to introduce the ability to handle sets consisting of homogeneous elements. Furthermore, we design a Modulate Module to endow the metric with the necessary adaptability. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three popular benchmarks. Moreover, it exceeds state-of-the-art transductive and cross-modal methods in the fine-grained scenario.

♻ ☆ A 3D Cross-modal Keypoint Descriptor for MR-US Matching and Registration

Daniil Morozov, Reuben Dorent, Nazim Haouchine

Intraoperative registration of real-time ultrasound (iUS) to preoperative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) remains an unsolved problem due to severe modality-specific differences in appearance, resolution, and field-of-view. To address this, we propose a novel 3D cross-modal keypoint descriptor for MRI-iUS matching and registration. Our approach employs a patient-specific matching-by-synthesis approach, generating synthetic iUS volumes from preoperative MRI. This enables supervised contrastive training to learn a shared descriptor space. A probabilistic keypoint detection strategy is then employed to identify anatomically salient and modality-consistent locations. During training, a curriculum-based triplet loss with dynamic hard negative mining is used to learn descriptors that are i) robust to iUS artifacts such as speckle noise and limited coverage, and ii) rotation-invariant. At inference, the method detects keypoints in MR and real iUS images and identifies sparse matches, which are then used to perform rigid registration. Our approach is evaluated using 3D MRI-iUS pairs from the ReMIND dataset. Experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art keypoint matching methods across 11 patients, with an average precision of 69.8%. For image registration, our method achieves a competitive mean Target Registration Error of 2.39 mm on the ReMIND2Reg benchmark. Compared to existing iUS-MR registration approaches, our framework is interpretable, requires no manual initialization, and shows robustness to iUS field-of-view variation. Code, data and model weights are available at https://github.com/morozovdd/CrossKEY.

comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging

♻ ☆ Enhancing Floor Plan Recognition: A Hybrid Mix-Transformer and U-Net Approach for Precise Wall Segmentation

Dmitriy Parashchuk, Alexey Kaspshitskiy, Yuriy Karyakin

Automatic 3D reconstruction of indoor spaces from 2D floor plans necessitates high-precision semantic segmentation of structural elements, particularly walls. However, existing methods often struggle with detecting thin structures and maintaining geometric precision. To address this, we introduce MitUNet, a hybrid neural network designed to bridge the gap between global semantic context and fine-grained structural details. Our architecture combines a Mix-Transformer encoder with a U-Net decoder enhanced with spatial and channel attention blocks. Optimized with the Tversky loss function, this approach achieves a balance between precision and recall, ensuring accurate boundary recovery. Experiments on the CubiCasa5k dataset and the regional dataset demonstrate MitUNet's superiority in generating structurally correct masks with high boundary accuracy, outperforming standard models. This tool provides a robust foundation for automated 3D reconstruction pipelines. To ensure reproducibility and facilitate future research, the source code and the regional dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/aliasstudio/mitunet and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17871079, respectively.

comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables

♻ ☆ Communicating about Space: Language-Mediated Spatial Integration Across Partial Views

Ankur Sikarwar, Debangan Mishra, Sudarshan Nikhil, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Aishwarya Agrawal

Humans build shared spatial understanding by communicating partial, viewpoint-dependent observations. We ask whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can do the same, aligning distinct egocentric views through dialogue to form a coherent, allocentric mental model of a shared environment. To study this systematically, we introduce COSMIC, a benchmark for Collaborative Spatial Communication. In this setting, two static MLLM agents observe a 3D indoor environment from different viewpoints and exchange natural-language messages to solve spatial queries. COSMIC contains 899 diverse scenes and 1250 question-answer pairs spanning five tasks. We find a capability hierarchy, MLLMs are most reliable at identifying shared anchor objects across views, perform worse on relational reasoning, and largely fail at building globally consistent maps, performing near chance, even for frontier models. Moreover, we find thinking capability yields gains in anchor grounding, but is insufficient for higher-level spatial communication. To contextualize model behavior, we collect 250 human-human dialogues. Humans achieve 95% aggregate accuracy, while the best model, Gemini-3-Pro-Thinking, reaches 72%, leaving substantial room for improvement. Moreover, human conversations grow more precise as partners align on a shared spatial understanding, whereas MLLMs keep exploring without converging, suggesting limited capacity to form and sustain a robust shared mental model throughout the dialogue. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ankursikarwar/Cosmic.

♻ ☆ EvalBlocks: A Modular Pipeline for Rapidly Evaluating Foundation Models in Medical Imaging

Jan Tagscherer, Sarah de Boer, Lena Philipp, Fennie van der Graaf, Dré Peeters, Joeran Bosma, Lars Leijten, Bogdan Obreja, Ewoud Smit, Alessa Hering

Developing foundation models in medical imaging requires continuous monitoring of downstream performance. Researchers are burdened with tracking numerous experiments, design choices, and their effects on performance, often relying on ad-hoc, manual workflows that are inherently slow and error-prone. We introduce EvalBlocks, a modular, plug-and-play framework for efficient evaluation of foundation models during development. Built on Snakemake, EvalBlocks supports seamless integration of new datasets, foundation models, aggregation methods, and evaluation strategies. All experiments and results are tracked centrally and are reproducible with a single command, while efficient caching and parallel execution enable scalable use on shared compute infrastructure. Demonstrated on five state-of-the-art foundation models and three medical imaging classification tasks, EvalBlocks streamlines model evaluation, enabling researchers to iterate faster and focus on model innovation rather than evaluation logistics. The framework is released as open source software at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/eval-blocks.

comment: Accepted and published in BVM 2026 proceedings (Springer)

♻ ☆ Toward Physically Consistent Driving Video World Models under Challenging Trajectories

Jiawei Zhou, Zhenxin Zhu, Lingyi Du, Linye Lyu, Lijun Zhou, Zhanqian Wu, Hongcheng Luo, Zhuotao Tian, Bing Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Haiyang Sun, Yu Li

Video generation models have shown strong potential as world models for autonomous driving simulation. However, existing approaches are primarily trained on real-world driving datasets, which mostly contain natural and safe driving scenarios. As a result, current models often fail when conditioned on challenging or counterfactual trajectories-such as imperfect trajectories generated by simulators or planning systems-producing videos with severe physical inconsistencies and artifacts. To address this limitation, we propose PhyGenesis, a world model designed to generate driving videos with high visual fidelity and strong physical consistency. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) a physical condition generator that transforms potentially invalid trajectory inputs into physically plausible conditions, and (2) a physics-enhanced video generator that produces high-fidelity multi-view driving videos under these conditions. To effectively train these components, we construct a large-scale, physics-rich heterogeneous dataset. Specifically, in addition to real-world driving videos, we generate diverse challenging driving scenarios using the CARLA simulator, from which we derive supervision signals that guide the model to learn physically grounded dynamics under extreme conditions. This challenging-trajectory learning strategy enables trajectory correction and promotes physically consistent video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhyGenesis consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially on challenging trajectories. Our project page is available at: https://wm-research.github.io/PhyGenesis/.

♻ ☆ How Blind and Low-Vision Individuals Prefer Large Vision-Language Model-Generated Scene Descriptions

Na Min An, Eunki Kim, Wan Ju Kang, Sangryul Kim, James Thorne, Hyunjung Shim

For individuals with blindness or low vision (BLV), navigating complex environments can pose serious risks. Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show promise for generating scene descriptions, but their effectiveness for BLV users remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a user study with eight BLV participants to systematically evaluate preferences for six types of LVLM descriptions. While they helped to reduce fear and improve actionability, user ratings showed wide variation in sufficiency and conciseness. Furthermore, GPT-4o--despite its strong potential to refine descriptions--was not consistently preferred by participants. We use the insights obtained from the user study to build training data for building our new automatic evaluation metric that can capture BLV preferences effectively. Our findings underscore the urgent need for BLV-centered evaluation metrics and human-in-the-loop feedback to advance LVLM description quality for accessibility.

comment: This paper has been superseded by version 2 of arXiv:2510.00766

♻ ☆ Grow, Assess, Compress: Adaptive Backbone Scaling for Memory-Efficient Class Incremental Learning

Adrian Garcia-Castañeda, Jon Irureta, Jon Imaz, Aizea Lojo

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) poses a fundamental challenge: maintaining a balance between the plasticity required to learn new tasks and the stability needed to prevent catastrophic forgetting. While expansion-based methods effectively mitigate forgetting by adding task-specific parameters, they suffer from uncontrolled architectural growth and memory overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic scaling framework that adaptively manages model capacity through a cyclic "GRow, Assess, ComprEss" (GRACE) strategy. Crucially, we supplement backbone expansion with a novel saturation assessment phase that evaluates the utilization of the model's capacity. This assessment allows the framework to make informed decisions to either expand the architecture or compress the backbones into a streamlined representation, preventing parameter explosion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIL benchmarks, while reducing memory footprint by up to a 73% compared to purely expansionist models.

♻ ☆ Are Large Vision-Language Models Ready to Guide Blind and Low-Vision Individuals?

Eunki Kim, Na Min An, Wan Ju Kang, Sangryul Kim, James Thorne, Hyunjung Shim

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate a promising direction for assisting individuals with blindness or low-vision (BLV). Yet, measuring their true utility in real-world scenarios is challenging because evaluating whether their descriptions are BLV-informative requires a fundamentally different approach from assessing standard scene descriptions. While the "VLM-as-a-metric" or "LVLM-as-a-judge" paradigm has emerged, existing evaluators still fall short of capturing the unique requirements of BLV-centric evaluation, lacking at least one of the following key properties: (1) High correlation with human judgments, (2) Long instruction understanding, (3) Score generation efficiency, and (4) Multi-dimensional assessment. To this end, we propose a unified framework to bridge the gap between automated evaluation and actual BLV needs. First, we conduct an in-depth user study with BLV participants to understand and quantify their navigational preferences, curating VL-GUIDEDATA, a large-scale BLV user-simulated preference dataset containing image-request-response-score pairs. We then leverage the dataset to develop an accessibility-aware evaluator, VL-GUIDE-S, which outperforms existing (L)VLM judges in both human alignment and inference efficiency. Notably, its effectiveness extends beyond a single domain, demonstrating strong performance across multiple fine-grained, BLV-critical dimensions. We hope our work lays as a foundation for automatic AI judges that advance safe, barrier-free navigation for BLV users.

comment: 42 pages, 14 figures, 28 tables

♻ ☆ From Hindsight to Foresight: Self-Encouraged Hindsight Distillation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering

Yu Zhao, Ying Zhang, Xuhui Sui, Baohang Zhou, Li Shen, Dacheng Tao

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KBVQA) necessitates external knowledge incorporation beyond cross-modal understanding. Existing KBVQA methods either utilize implicit knowledge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) via in-context learning or explicit knowledge via retrieval augmented generation. However, their reasoning processes remain implicit, without explicit multi-step trajectories from MLLMs. To address this gap, we provide a Hindsight Distilled Reasoning (HinD) framework with Knowledge Encouragement Preference Optimization, aiming at self-encouraging the knowledge reasoning ability inside the MLLM. First, we construct the Hindsight Teacher by prompting the MLLM to complete the reasoning process with knowing the right answer, obtaining Hindsight-Zero training data. Then, the Foresight Student, without knowing the answer, learns the golden trajectories from Hindsight: (1) Hindsight Distillation Fine-Tuning (HDFT) to self-distill the Hindsight-Zero into a modularized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Generator and a Knowledge Generator for sequential steps and discrete facts generation, respectively; (2) Knowledge Encouragement Preference Optimization (KEPO) to encourage the under-confident but relevant knowledge inside the MLLM and suppress the over-confident but irrelevant one. Experiments on OK-VQA and A-OKVQA validate the effectiveness of HinD, showing that HinD with 7-8B MLLM achieves superior performance without commercial model APIs or retrieved knowledge.

♻ ☆ Attention-guided reference point shifting for Gaussian-mixture-based partial point set registration

Mizuki Kikkawa, Tatsuya Yatagawa, Yutaka Ohtake, Hiromasa Suzuki

This study investigates the impact of the invariance of feature vectors for partial-to-partial point set registration under translation and rotation of input point sets, particularly in the realm of techniques based on deep learning and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We reveal both theoretical and practical problems associated with such deep-learning-based registration methods using GMMs, with a particular focus on the limitations of DeepGMR, a pioneering study in this line, to the partial-to-partial point set registration. Our primary goal is to uncover the causes behind such methods and propose a comprehensible solution for that. To address this, we introduce an attention-based reference point shifting (ARPS) layer, which robustly identifies a common reference point of two partial point sets, thereby acquiring transformation-invariant features. The ARPS layer employs a well-studied attention module to find a common reference point rather than the overlap region. Owing to this, it significantly enhances the performance of DeepGMR and its recent variant, UGMMReg. Furthermore, these extension models outperform even prior deep learning methods using attention blocks and Transformer to extract the overlap region or common reference points. We believe these findings provide deeper insights into registration methods using deep learning and GMMs.

comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables

♻ ☆ Two-stage Vision Transformers and Hard Masking offer Robust Object Representations

Ananthu Aniraj, Cassio F. Dantas, Dino Ienco, Diego Marcos

Context can strongly affect object representations, sometimes leading to undesired biases, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds at inference. At the same time, many object-centric tasks require to leverage the context for identifying the relevant image regions. We posit that this conundrum, in which context is simultaneously needed and a potential nuisance, can be addressed by an attention-based approach that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. To test this hypothesis, we evaluate a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, for which context cues are likely to be needed, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. The explicit nature of the semantic masks also makes the model's reasoning auditable, enabling powerful test-time interventions to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that this approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds. Code: https://github.com/ananthu-aniraj/ifam

comment: Accepted at ICPR 2026

♻ ☆ Refracting Reality: Generating Images with Realistic Transparent Objects

Yue Yin, Enze Tao, Dylan Campbell

Generative image models can produce convincingly real images, with plausible shapes, textures, layouts and lighting. However, one domain in which they perform notably poorly is in the synthesis of transparent objects, which exhibit refraction, reflection, absorption and scattering. Refraction is a particular challenge, because refracted pixel rays often intersect with surfaces observed in other parts of the image, providing a constraint on the color. It is clear from inspection that generative models have not distilled the laws of optics sufficiently well to accurately render refractive objects. In this work, we consider the problem of generating images with accurate refraction, given a text prompt. We synchronize the pixels within the object's boundary with those outside by warping and merging the pixels using Snell's Law of Refraction, at each step of the generation trajectory. For those surfaces that are not directly observed in the image, but are visible via refraction or reflection, we recover their appearance by synchronizing the image with a second generated image -- a panorama centered at the object -- using the same warping and merging procedure. We demonstrate that our approach generates much more optically-plausible images that respect the physical constraints.

comment: https://github.com/YueYin27/snellcaster.git

♻ ☆ Organizing Unstructured Image Collections using Natural Language CVPR 2026

Mingxuan Liu, Zhun Zhong, Jun Li, Gianni Franchi, Subhankar Roy, Elisa Ricci

In this work, we introduce and study the novel task of Open-ended Semantic Multiple Clustering (OpenSMC). Given a large, unstructured image collection, the goal is to automatically discover several, diverse semantic clustering criteria (e.g., Activity or Location) from the images, and subsequently organize them according to the discovered criteria, without requiring any human input. Our framework, X-Cluster: eXploratory Clustering, treats text as a reasoning proxy: it concurrently scans the entire image collection, proposes candidate criteria in natural language, and groups images into meaningful clusters per criterion. This radically differs from previous works, which either assume predefined clustering criteria or fixed cluster counts. To evaluate X-Cluster, we create two new benchmarks, COCO-4C and Food-4C, each annotated with four distinct grouping criteria and corresponding cluster labels. Experiments show that X-Cluster can effectively reveal meaningful partitions on several datasets. Finally, we use X-Cluster to achieve various real-world applications, including uncovering hidden biases in text-to-image (T2I) generative models and analyzing image virality on social media. Project page: https://oatmealliu.github.io/xcluster.html

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 Findings. Project page: https://oatmealliu.github.io/xcluster.html

♻ ☆ ForgeDreamer: Industrial Text-to-3D Generation with Multi-Expert LoRA and Cross-View Hypergraph CVPR 2026

Junhao Cai, Deyu Zeng, Junhao Pang, Lini Li, Zongze Wu, Xiaopin Zhong

Current text-to-3D generation methods excel in natural scenes but struggle with industrial applications due to two critical limitations: domain adaptation challenges where conventional LoRA fusion causes knowledge interference across categories, and geometric reasoning deficiencies where pairwise consistency constraints fail to capture higher-order structural dependencies essential for precision manufacturing. We propose a novel framework named ForgeDreamer addressing both challenges through two key innovations. First, we introduce a Multi-Expert LoRA Ensemble mechanism that consolidates multiple category-specific LoRA models into a unified representation, achieving superior cross-category generalization while eliminating knowledge interference. Second, building on enhanced semantic understanding, we develop a Cross-View Hypergraph Geometric Enhancement approach that captures structural dependencies spanning multiple viewpoints simultaneously. These components work synergistically improved semantic understanding, enables more effective geometric reasoning, while hypergraph modeling ensures manufacturing-level consistency. Extensive experiments on a custom industrial dataset demonstrate superior semantic generalization and enhanced geometric fidelity compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/Junhaocai27/ForgeDreamer

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 Findings!

♻ ☆ Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Shi-Xue Zhang, Zhengkai Jiang, Lucas Wang, Zhao Zhong, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

comment: Project Page: https://github.com/shawn0728/Unify-Agent

♻ ☆ Coupled Reconstruction of 2D Blood Flow and Vessel Geometry from Noisy Images via Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Quasi-Conformal Mapping

Han Zhang, Xue-Cheng Tai, Jean-Michel Morel, Raymond H. Chan

Blood flow imaging provides important information for hemodynamic behavior within the vascular system and plays an essential role in medical diagnosis and treatment planning. However, obtaining high-quality flow images remains a significant challenge. In this work, we address the problem of denoising flow images that may suffer from artifacts due to short acquisition times or device-induced errors. We formulate this task as an optimization problem, where the objective is to minimize the discrepancy between the modeled velocity field, constrained to satisfy the Navier-Stokes equations, and the observed noisy velocity data. To solve this problem, we decompose it into two subproblems: a fluid subproblem and a geometry subproblem. The fluid subproblem leverages a Physics-Informed Neural Network to reconstruct the velocity field from noisy observations, assuming a fixed domain. The geometry subproblem aims to infer the underlying flow region by optimizing a quasi-conformal mapping that deforms a reference domain. These two subproblems are solved in an alternating Gauss-Seidel fashion, iteratively refining both the velocity field and the domain. Upon convergence, the framework yields a high-quality reconstruction of the flow image. We validate the proposed method through experiments on synthetic flow data in a converging channel geometry under varying levels of Gaussian noise, and on real-like flow data in an aortic geometry with signal-dependent noise. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the approach. Additionally, ablation studies are conducted to assess the influence of key hyperparameters.

♻ ☆ Representation Learning with Semantic-aware Instance and Sparse Token Alignments

Phuoc-Nguyen Bui, Toan Duc Nguyen, Junghyun Bum, Duc-Tai Le, Hyunseung Choo

Medical contrastive vision-language pre-training (VLP) has demonstrated significant potential in improving performance on downstream tasks. Traditional approaches typically employ contrastive learning, treating paired image-report samples as positives and unpaired ones as negatives. However, in medical datasets, there can be substantial similarities between images or reports from different patients. Rigidly treating all unpaired samples as negatives, can disrupt the underlying semantic structure and negatively impact the quality of the learned representations. In this paper, we propose a multi-level alignment framework, Representation Learning with Semantic-aware Instance and Sparse Token Alignments (SISTA) by exploiting the semantic correspondence between medical image and radiology reports at two levels, i.e., image-report and patch-word levels. Specifically, we improve the conventional contrastive learning by incorporating inter-report similarity to eliminate the false negatives and introduce a method to effectively align image patches with relevant word tokens. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving transfer performance across different datasets on three downstream tasks: image classification, image segmentation, and object detection. Notably, our framework achieves significant improvements in fine-grained tasks even with limited labeled data. Codes and pre-trained models will be made available.

comment: Accepted to ICPR 2026

♻ ☆ Q-DiT4SR: Exploration of Detail-Preserving Diffusion Transformer Quantization for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Xun Zhang, Kaicheng Yang, Hongliang Lu, Haotong Qin, Yong Guo, Yulun Zhang

Recently, Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged in Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) to generate high-quality textures, yet their heavy inference burden hinders real-world deployment. While Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is a promising solution for acceleration, existing methods in super-resolution mostly focus on U-Net architectures, whereas generic DiT quantization is typically designed for text-to-image tasks. Directly applying these methods to DiT-based super-resolution models leads to severe degradation of local textures. Therefore, we propose Q-DiT4SR, the first PTQ framework specifically tailored for DiT-based Real-ISR. We propose H-SVD, a hierarchical SVD that integrates a global low-rank branch with a local block-wise rank-1 branch under a matched parameter budget. We further propose Variance-aware Spatio-Temporal Mixed Precision: VaSMP allocates cross-layer weight bit-widths in a data-free manner based on rate-distortion theory, while VaTMP schedules intra-layer activation precision across diffusion timesteps via dynamic programming (DP) with minimal calibration. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our Q-DiT4SR achieves SOTA performance under both W4A6 and W4A4 settings. Notably, the W4A4 quantization configuration reduces model size by 5.8$\times$ and computational operations by 6.14$\times$. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/xunzhang1128/Q-DiT4SR.

comment: Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/xunzhang1128/Q-DiT4SR

♻ ☆ Conditional Polarization Guidance for Camouflaged Object Detection

QIfan Zhang, Hao Wang, Xiangrong Qin, Ruijie Li

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify targets that are highly blended with their backgrounds. Recent works have shown that the optical characteristics of polarization cues play a significant role in improving camouflaged object detection. However, most existing polarization-based approaches depend on complex visual encoders and fusion mechanisms, leading to increased model complexity and computational overhead, while failing to fully explore how polarization can explicitly guide hierarchical RGB representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose CPGNet, an asymmetric RGB-polarization framework that introduces a conditional polarization guidance mechanism to explicitly regulate RGB feature learning for camouflaged object detection. Specifically, we design a lightweight polarization interaction module that jointly models these complementary cues and generates reliable polarization guidance in a unified manner. Unlike conventional feature fusion strategies, the proposed conditional guidance mechanism dynamically modulates RGB features using polarization priors, enabling the network to focus on subtle discrepancies between camouflaged objects and their backgrounds. Furthermore, we introduce a polarization edge-guided frequency refinement strategy that enhances high-frequency components under polarization constraints, effectively breaking camouflage patterns. Finally, we develop an iterative feedback decoder to perform coarse-to-fine feature calibration and progressively refine camouflage prediction. Extensive experiments on polarization datasets across multiple tasks, along with evaluations on non-polarization datasets, demonstrate that CPGNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables

♻ ☆ WaveGuard: Robust Deepfake Detection and Source Tracing via Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet and Graph Neural Networks

Ziyuan He, Zhiqing Guo, Liejun Wang, Gaobo Yang, Yunfeng Diao, Dan Ma

Deepfake technology poses increasing risks such as privacy invasion and identity theft. To address these threats, we propose WaveGuard, a proactive watermarking framework that enhances robustness and imperceptibility via frequency-domain embedding and graph-based structural consistency. Specifically, we embed watermarks into high-frequency sub-bands using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DT-CWT) and employ a Structural Consistency Graph Neural Network (SC-GNN) to preserve visual quality. We also design an attention module to refine embedding precision. Experimental results on face swap and reenactment tasks demonstrate that WaveGuard outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both robustness and visual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/vpsg-research/WaveGuard.

comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables

♻ ☆ Cross-Camera Distracted Driver Classification through Feature Disentanglement and Contrastive Learning

Luigi Celona, Simone Bianco, Paolo Napoletano

The classification of distracted drivers is pivotal for ensuring safe driving. Previous studies demonstrated the effectiveness of neural networks in automatically predicting driver distraction, fatigue, and potential hazards. However, recent research has uncovered a significant loss of accuracy in these models when applied to samples acquired under conditions that differ from the training data. In this paper, we introduce a robust model designed to withstand changes in camera position within the vehicle. Our Driver Behavior Monitoring Network (DBMNet) relies on a lightweight backbone and integrates a disentanglement module to discard camera view information from features, coupled with contrastive learning to enhance the encoding of various driver actions. Experiments conducted using a leave-one-camera-out protocol on the daytime and nighttime subsets of the 100-Driver dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach. Cross-dataset and cross-camera experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets, namely AUCDD-V1, EZZ2021 and SFD, demonstrate the superior generalization capabilities of the proposed method. Overall DBMNet achieves an improvement of 7% in Top-1 accuracy compared to existing efficient approaches. Moreover, a quantized version of the DBMNet and all considered methods has been deployed on a Coral Dev Board board. In this deployment scenario, DBMNet outperforms alternatives, achieving the lowest average error while maintaining a compact model size, low memory footprint, fast inference time, and minimal power consumption.

♻ ☆ Cross-modal Proxy Evolving for OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models AAAI 2026

Hao Tang, Yu Liu, Shuanglin Yan, Fei Shen, Shengfeng He, Jing Qin

Reliable zero-shot detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is critical for deploying vision-language models in open-world settings. However, the lack of labeled negatives in zero-shot OOD detection necessitates proxy signals that remain effective under distribution shift. Existing negative-label methods rely on a fixed set of textual proxies, which (i) sparsely sample the semantic space beyond in-distribution (ID) classes and (ii) remain static while only visual features drift, leading to cross-modal misalignment and unstable predictions. In this paper, we propose CoEvo, a training- and annotation-free test-time framework that performs bidirectional, sample-conditioned adaptation of both textual and visual proxies. Specifically, CoEvo introduces a proxy-aligned co-evolution mechanism to maintain two evolving proxy caches, which dynamically mines contextual textual negatives guided by test images and iteratively refines visual proxies, progressively realigning cross-modal similarities and enlarging local OOD margins. Finally, we dynamically re-weight the contributions of dual-modal proxies to obtain a calibrated OOD score that is robust to distribution shift. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CoEvo achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AUROC by 1.33% and reducing FPR95 by 45.98% on ImageNet-1K compared to strong negative-label baselines.

comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026

♻ ☆ Erased, But Not Forgotten: Erased Rectified Flow Transformers Still Remain Unsafe Under Concept Attack

Nanxiang Jiang, Zhaoxin Fan, Enhan Kang, Daiheng Gao, Yun Zhou, Yanxia Chang, Zheng Zhu, Yeying Jin, Wenjun Wu

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have enabled impressive generative capabilities, but they also raise significant safety concerns due to the potential to produce harmful or undesirable content. While concept erasure has been explored as a mitigation strategy, most existing approaches and corresponding attack evaluations are tailored to Stable Diffusion (SD) and exhibit limited effectiveness when transferred to next-generation rectified flow transformers such as Flux. In this work, we present ReFlux, the first concept attack method specifically designed to assess the robustness of concept erasure in the latest rectified flow-based T2I framework. Our approach is motivated by the observation that existing concept erasure techniques, when applied to Flux, fundamentally rely on a phenomenon known as attention localization. Building on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective attack strategy that specifically targets this property. At its core, a reverse-attention optimization strategy is introduced to effectively reactivate suppressed signals while stabilizing attention. This is further reinforced by a velocity-guided dynamic that enhances the robustness of concept reactivation by steering the flow matching process, and a consistency-preserving objective that maintains the global layout and preserves unrelated content. Extensive experiments consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed attack method, establishing a reliable benchmark for evaluating the robustness of concept erasure strategies in rectified flow transformers.

♻ ☆ Improving Multimodal Sentiment Analysis via Modality Optimization and Dynamic Primary Modality Selection

Dingkang Yang, Mingcheng Li, Xuecheng Wu, Zhaoyu Chen, Kaixun Jiang, Keliang Liu, Peng Zhai, Lihua Zhang

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to predict sentiment from language, acoustic, and visual data in videos. However, imbalanced unimodal performance often leads to suboptimal fused representations. Existing approaches typically adopt fixed primary modality strategies to maximize dominant modality advantages, yet fail to adapt to dynamic variations in modality importance across different samples. Moreover, non-language modalities suffer from sequential redundancy and noise, degrading model performance when they serve as primary inputs. To address these issues, this paper proposes a modality optimization and dynamic primary modality selection framework (MODS). First, a Graph-based Dynamic Sequence Compressor (GDC) is constructed, which employs capsule networks and graph convolution to reduce sequential redundancy in acoustic/visual modalities. Then, we develop a sample-adaptive Primary Modality Selector (MSelector) for dynamic dominance determination. Finally, a Primary-modality-Centric Cross-Attention (PCCA) module is designed to enhance dominant modalities while facilitating cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that MODS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance by effectively balancing modality contributions and eliminating redundant noise.

♻ ☆ ActionMesh: Animated 3D Mesh Generation with Temporal 3D Diffusion CVPR 2026

Remy Sabathier, David Novotny, Niloy J. Mitra, Tom Monnier

Generating animated 3D objects is at the heart of many applications, yet most advanced works are typically difficult to apply in practice because of their limited setup, their long runtime, or their limited quality. We introduce ActionMesh, a generative model that predicts production-ready 3D meshes "in action" in a feed-forward manner. Drawing inspiration from early video models, our key insight is to modify existing 3D diffusion models to include a temporal axis, resulting in a framework we dubbed "temporal 3D diffusion". Specifically, we first adapt the 3D diffusion stage to generate a sequence of synchronized latents representing time-varying and independent 3D shapes. Second, we design a temporal 3D autoencoder that translates a sequence of independent shapes into the corresponding deformations of a pre-defined reference shape, allowing us to build an animation. Combining these two components, ActionMesh generates animated 3D meshes from different inputs like a monocular video, a text description, or even a 3D mesh with a text prompt describing its animation. Besides, compared to previous approaches, our method is fast and produces results that are rig-free and topology consistent, hence enabling rapid iteration and seamless applications like texturing and retargeting. We evaluate our model on standard video-to-4D benchmarks (Consistent4D, Objaverse) and report state-of-the-art performances on both geometric accuracy and temporal consistency, demonstrating that our model can deliver animated 3D meshes with unprecedented speed and quality.

comment: CVPR 2026. Project webpage with code and videos: https://remysabathier.github.io/actionmesh/ . V2 update includes more baseline models with a larger evaluation set on our new publicly released benchmark ActionBench, and {3D+video}-to-animated-mesh qualitative comparison in supplemental

♻ ☆ CodeDance: A Dynamic Tool-integrated MLLM for Executable Visual Reasoning CVPR 2026

Qi Song, Honglin Li, Yingchen Yu, Haoyi Zhou, Lin Yang, Song Bai, Qi She, Zilong Huang, Yunqing Zhao

Recent releases such as o3 highlight human-like "thinking with images" reasoning that combines tool use with stepwise verification, yet most open-source approaches still rely on text-only chains, rigid visual schemas, or single-step pipelines, limiting flexibility, interpretability, and transferability on complex tasks. We introduce CodeDance, which explores executable code as a general solver for visual reasoning. Unlike fixed-schema calls (e.g., only predicting bounding-box coordinates), CodeDance defines, composes, and executes code to orchestrate multiple tools, compute intermediate results, and render visual artifacts (e.g., boxes, lines, plots) that support transparent, self-checkable reasoning. To guide this process, we introduce a reward for balanced and adaptive tool calling, which balances exploration with efficiency and mitigates tool overuse. Interestingly, beyond the expected capabilities taught by atomic supervision, we empirically observe novel emergent behaviors during RL training: CodeDance demonstrates novel tool invocations, unseen compositions, and cross-task transfer. These behaviors arise without task-specific fine-tuning, suggesting a general and scalable mechanism for executable visual reasoning. Extensive experiments across reasoning benchmarks (e.g., visual search, math, chart QA) show that CodeDance not only consistently outperforms schema-driven and text-only baselines, but also surpasses closed models such as GPT-4o and larger open-source models.

comment: CVPR 2026. Project page: https://codedance-vl.github.io/

♻ ☆ BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel, Yan Shu, Angelos Zavras, Ioannis Papoutsis, Paolo Rota, Begüm Demir

Vision-langugage models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in computer vision (CV), yet their performance on remote sensing (RS) data remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, multi-sensor RS image-text datasets with diverse textual annotations. Existing datasets predominantly include aerial Red-Green-Blue imagery, with short or weakly grounded captions, and provide limited diversity in annotation types. To address this limitation, we introduce BigEarthNet$.$txt, a large-scale, multi-sensor image-text dataset designed to advance instruction-driven image-text learning in Earth observation across multiple tasks. BigEarthNet$.$txt contains 464044 co-registered Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 multispectral images with 9.6M text annotations, including: i) geographically anchored captions describing land-use/land-cover (LULC) classes, their spatial relations, and environmental context; ii) visual question answering pairs relevant for different tasks; and iii) referring expression detection instructions for bounding box prediction. Through a comparative statistical analysis, we demonstrate that BigEarthNet$.$txt surpasses existing RS image-text datasets in textual richness and annotation type variety. We further establish a manually-verified benchmark split to evaluate VLMs in RS and CV. The results show the limitations of these models on tasks that involve complex LULC classes, whereas fine-tuning using BigEarthNet$.$txt results in consistent performance gains across all considered tasks.

comment: For details, see https://txt.bigearth.net

♻ ☆ Error Propagation Mechanisms and Compensation Strategies for Quantized Diffusion

Songwei Liu, Chao Zeng, Chenqian Yan, Xurui Peng, Xing Wang, Fangmin Chen, Xing Mei

Diffusion models have transformed image synthesis by establishing unprecedented quality and creativity benchmarks. Nevertheless, their large-scale deployment faces challenges due to computationally intensive iterative denoising processes. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) provides an effective pathway for accelerating sampling, the iterative nature of diffusion models causes stepwise quantization errors to accumulate progressively during generation, inevitably compromising output fidelity. To address this challenge, we develop a theoretical framework that mathematically formulates error propagation in Diffusion Models (DMs), deriving per-step quantization error propagation equations and establishing the first closed-form solution for cumulative error. Building on this theoretical foundation, we propose a timestep-aware cumulative error compensation scheme. Extensive experiments on multiple image datasets demonstrate that our compensation strategy effectively mitigates error propagation, significantly enhancing existing PTQ methods. Specifically, it achieves a 1.2 PSNR improvement over SVDQuant on SDXL W4A4, while incurring only an additional $<$ 0.5\% time overhead.

♻ ☆ Exploring Self-Supervised Learning with U-Net Masked Autoencoders and EfficientNet-B7 for Improved Gastrointestinal Abnormality Classification in Video Capsule Endoscopy

Vamshi Krishna Kancharla, Pavan Kumar Kaveti, Dasari Naga Raju

Video Capsule Endoscopy (VCE) has become an indispensable diagnostic tool for gastrointestinal (GI) disorders due to its non-invasive nature and ability to capture high-resolution images of the small intestine. However, the enormous volume of data generated during a single procedure makes manual inspection labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to inter-observer variability. Automated analysis using deep learning offers a promising solution, but its effectiveness is often limited by data imbalance and the high cost of labeled medical data. In this work, we propose a novel framework that combines self-supervised learning through a U-Net-based masked autoencoder with supervised feature extraction using EfficientNet-B7 for multi-class abnormality classification in VCE images. The U-Net model is first trained in a self-supervised manner using Gaussian noise removal and masked reconstruction to learn robust visual representations without requiring annotations. The learned encoder features are then fused with EfficientNet-B7 features to form a rich, discriminative representation for classification. We evaluate our approach on the Capsule Vision 2024 Challenge dataset consisting of ten abnormality classes and a dominant normal class. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion framework achieves a validation accuracy of 94\%, outperforming standalone architectures and attention-based fusion variants. The study highlights the effectiveness of self-supervised representation learning and feature fusion in addressing class imbalance and improving diagnostic accuracy in real-world medical imaging scenarios.

comment: Capsule Vision 2024 Challenge

♻ ☆ Video2LoRA: Unified Semantic-Controlled Video Generation via Per-Reference-Video LoRA

Zexi Wu, Baolu Li, Jing Dai, Yiming Zhang, Yue Ma, Qinghe Wang, Xu Jia, Hongming Xu

Achieving semantic alignment across diverse video generation conditions remains a significant challenge. Methods that rely on explicit structural guidance often enforce rigid spatial constraints that limit semantic flexibility, whereas models tailored for individual control types lack interoperability and adaptability. These design bottlenecks hinder progress toward flexible and efficient semantic video generation. To address this, we propose Video2LoRA, a scalable and generalizable framework for semantic-controlled video generation that conditions on a reference video. Video2LoRA employs a lightweight hypernetwork to predict personalized LoRA weights for each semantic input, which are combined with auxiliary matrices to form adaptive LoRA modules integrated into a frozen diffusion backbone. This design enables the model to generate videos consistent with the reference semantics while preserving key style and content variations, eliminating the need for any per-condition training. Notably, the final model weights less than 150MB, making it highly efficient for storage and deployment. Video2LoRA achieves coherent, semantically aligned generation across diverse conditions and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen semantics.

comment: 10 pages

♻ ☆ CoCoDiff: Correspondence-Consistent Diffusion Model for Fine-grained Style Transfer

Wenbo Nie, Zixiang Li, Renshuai Tao, Bin Wu, Yunchao Wei, Yao Zhao

Transferring visual style between images while preserving semantic correspondence between similar objects remains a central challenge in computer vision. While existing methods have made great strides, most of them operate at global level but overlook region-wise and even pixel-wise semantic correspondence. To address this, we propose CoCoDiff, a novel training-free and low-cost style transfer framework that leverages pretrained latent diffusion models to achieve fine-grained, semantically consistent stylization. We identify that correspondence cues within generative diffusion models are under-explored and that content consistency across semantically matched regions is often neglected. CoCoDiff introduces a pixel-wise semantic correspondence module that mines intermediate diffusion features to construct a dense alignment map between content and style images. Furthermore, a cycle-consistency module then enforces structural and perceptual alignment across iterations, yielding object and region level stylization that preserves geometry and detail. Despite requiring no additional training or supervision, CoCoDiff delivers state-of-the-art visual quality and strong quantitative results, outperforming methods that rely on extra training or annotations.

♻ ☆ Low-Resolution Editing is All You Need for High-Resolution Editing CVPR 2026

Junsung Lee, Hyunsoo Lee, Yong Jae Lee, Bohyung Han

High-resolution content creation is rapidly emerging as a central challenge in both the vision and graphics communities. Images serve as the most fundamental modality for visual expression, and content generation that aligns with the user intent requires effective, controllable high-resolution image manipulation mechanisms. However, existing approaches remain limited to low-resolution settings, typically supporting only up to 1K resolution. In this work, we introduce the task of high-resolution image editing and propose a test-time optimization framework to address it. Our method performs patch-wise optimization on high-resolution source images, followed by a fine-grained detail transfer module and a novel synchronization strategy to maintain consistency across patches. Extensive experiments show that our method produces high-quality edits, facilitating high-resolution content creation.

comment: CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ MOLM: Mixture of LoRA Markers ICLR 2026

Samar Fares, Nurbek Tastan, Noor Hussein, Karthik Nandakumar

Generative models can generate photorealistic images at scale. This raises urgent concerns about the ability to detect synthetically generated images and attribute these images to specific sources. While watermarking has emerged as a possible solution, existing methods remain fragile to realistic distortions, susceptible to adaptive removal, and expensive to update when the underlying watermarking key changes. We propose a general watermarking framework that formulates the encoding problem as key-dependent perturbation of the parameters of a generative model. Within this framework, we introduce Mixture of LoRA Markers (MOLM), a routing-based instantiation in which binary keys activate lightweight LoRA adapters inside residual and attention blocks. This design avoids key-specific re-training and achieves the desired properties such as imperceptibility, fidelity, verifiability, and robustness. Experiments on Stable Diffusion and FLUX show that MOLM preserves image quality while achieving robust key recovery against distortions, compression and regeneration, averaging attacks, and black-box adversarial attacks on the extractor.

comment: ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ RANGER: A Monocular Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation Framework through Visual Contextual Adaptation

Ming-Ming Yu, Yi Chen, Börje F. Karlsson, Wenjun Wu

Efficient target localization and autonomous navigation in complex environments are fundamental to real-world embodied applications. While recent advances in multimodal foundation models have enabled zero-shot object goal navigation, allowing robots to search for arbitrary objects without fine-tuning, existing methods face two key limitations: (1) heavy reliance on ground-truth depth and pose information, which restricts applicability in real-world scenarios; and (2) lack of visual in-context learning (VICL) capability to extract geometric and semantic priors from environmental context, as in a short traversal video. To address these challenges, we propose RANGER, a novel zero-shot, open-vocabulary semantic navigation framework that operates using only a monocular camera. Leveraging powerful 3D foundation models, RANGER eliminates the dependency on depth and pose while exhibiting strong VICL capability. By simply observing a short video of the target environment, the system can also significantly improve task efficiency without requiring architectural modifications or task-specific retraining. The framework integrates several key components: keyframe-based 3D reconstruction, semantic point cloud generation, vision-language model (VLM)-driven exploration value estimation, high-level adaptive waypoint selection, and low-level action execution. Experiments on the HM3D benchmark and real-world environments demonstrate that RANGER achieves competitive performance in terms of navigation success rate and exploration efficiency, while showing superior VICL adaptability, with no previous 3D mapping of the environment required.

comment: Accepted at ICRA 2026

☆ LAtent Phase Inference from Short time sequences using SHallow REcurrent Decoders (LAPIS-SHRED)

Yuxuan Bao, Xingyue Zhang, J. Nathan Kutz

Reconstructing full spatio-temporal dynamics from sparse observations in both space and time remains a central challenge in complex systems, as measurements can be spatially incomplete and can be also limited to narrow temporal windows. Yet approximating the complete spatio-temporal trajectory is essential for mechanistic insight and understanding, model calibration, and operational decision-making. We introduce LAPIS-SHRED (LAtent Phase Inference from Short time sequence using SHallow REcurrent Decoders), a modular architecture that reconstructs and/or forecasts complete spatiotemporal dynamics from sparse sensor observations confined to short temporal windows. LAPIS-SHRED operates through a three-stage pipeline: (i) a SHRED model is pre-trained entirely on simulation data to map sensor time-histories into a structured latent space, (ii) a temporal sequence model, trained on simulation-derived latent trajectories, learns to propagate latent states forward or backward in time to span unobserved temporal regions from short observational time windows, and (iii) at deployment, only a short observation window of hyper-sparse sensor measurements from the true system is provided, from which the frozen SHRED model and the temporal model jointly reconstruct or forecast the complete spatiotemporal trajectory. The framework supports bidirectional inference, inherits data assimilation and multiscale reconstruction capabilities from its modular structure, and accommodates extreme observational constraints including single-frame terminal inputs. We evaluate LAPIS-SHRED on six experiments spanning complex spatio-temporal physics: turbulent flows, multiscale propulsion physics, volatile combustion transients, and satellite-derived environmental fields, highlighting a lightweight, modular architecture suited for operational settings where observation is constrained by physical or logistical limitations.

☆ The Recipe Matters More Than the Kitchen:Mathematical Foundations of the AI Weather Prediction Pipeline

Piyush Garg, Diana R. Gergel, Andrew E. Shao, Galen J. Yacalis

AI weather prediction has advanced rapidly, yet no unified mathematical framework explains what determines forecast skill. Existing theory addresses specific architectural choices rather than the learning pipeline as a whole, while operational evidence from 2023-2026 demonstrates that training methodology, loss function design, and data diversity matter at least as much as architecture selection. This paper makes two interleaved contributions. Theoretically, we construct a framework rooted in approximation theory on the sphere, dynamical systems theory, information theory, and statistical learning theory that treats the complete learning pipeline (architecture, loss function, training strategy, data distribution) rather than architecture alone. We establish a Learning Pipeline Error Decomposition showing that estimation error (loss- and data-dependent) dominates approximation error (architecture-dependent) at current scales. We develop a Loss Function Spectral Theory formalizing MSE-induced spectral blurring in spherical harmonic coordinates, and derive Out-of-Distribution Extrapolation Bounds proving that data-driven models systematically underestimate record-breaking extremes with bias growing linearly in record exceedance. Empirically, we validate these predictions via inference across ten architecturally diverse AI weather models using NVIDIA Earth2Studio with ERA5 initial conditions, evaluating six metrics across 30 initialization dates spanning all seasons. Results confirm universal spectral energy loss at high wavenumbers for MSE-trained models, rising Error Consensus Ratios showing that the majority of forecast error is shared across architectures, and linear negative bias during extreme events. A Holistic Model Assessment Score provides unified multi-dimensional evaluation, and a prescriptive framework enables mathematical evaluation of proposed pipelines before training.

☆ CliffSearch: Structured Agentic Co-Evolution over Theory and Code for Scientific Algorithm Discovery

Youssef Mroueh, Carlos Fonseca, Brian Belgodere, David Cox

Scientific algorithm discovery is iterative: hypotheses are proposed, implemented, stress-tested, and revised. Current LLM-guided search systems accelerate proposal generation, but often under-represent scientific structure by optimizing code-only artifacts with weak correctness/originality gating. We present CliffSearch, an agentic evolutionary framework in which the core evolution operators (pair selection, crossover, mutation, and review) are implemented as LLM agents, and the loop is designed around three principles: (1) each node is a structured scientific artifact, instantiated in either theory+code or code_only mode, (2) reviewer judgments of correctness and originality are first-class selection gates alongside optimization of the benchmark metric of interest, and (3) mutation is split into exploration and correction pathways with distinct objectives. Exploration mutation imports ideas from adjacent scientific domains to increase novelty, while correction mutation performs targeted evidence-guided repair using reviewer signals over theory, code, benchmark results, and runtime errors. We illustrate the framework on three benchmark-grounded studies: transformer hyper-connection evolution, optimizer discovery on a fixed nanoGPT stack, and a smaller native-optimizer ablation. Across these settings, the same loop supports explicit metric direction, reproducible persistence, and reviewer-gated comparison of discoveries under controlled search conditions. The result is a discovery workflow that prioritizes scientific interpretability and correctness while optimizing task metrics under controlled novelty constraints, rather than maximizing candidate throughput alone. Full run artifacts, interactive visualizations, and exported best nodes for the reported studies are available at https://cliffsearch.ai .

☆ LLM REgression with a Latent Iterative State Head

Yiheng Su, Matthew Lease

We present RELISH (REgression with a Latent Iterative State Head), a novel, lightweight architecture designed for text regression with large language models. Rather than decoding numeric targets as text or aggregating multiple generated outputs, RELISH predicts scalar values directly from frozen LLM representations by iteratively refining a learned latent state through cross-attention over token-level representations, and then mapping the final state to a point estimate with a linear regressor. Across five datasets, four LLM backbones, and two LLM training regimes, RELISH consistently outperforms prior baselines from all three major LLM regression families, including autoregressive decoding, regression-aware inference, and existing predictive head methods. Despite these gains, RELISH remains highly parameter-efficient, requiring only 3.4-3.7M trainable parameters across frozen LLM backbones (only 0.01-0.04% additional overhead), far less than LoRA-based alternatives that grow with model size (0.26-0.42%).

☆ Neural Harmonic Textures for High-Quality Primitive Based Neural Reconstruction

Jorge Condor, Nicolas Moenne-Loccoz, Merlin Nimier-David, Piotr Didyk, Zan Gojcic, Qi Wu

Primitive-based methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have recently become the state-of-the-art for novel-view synthesis and related reconstruction tasks. Compared to neural fields, these representations are more flexible, adaptive, and scale better to large scenes. However, the limited expressivity of individual primitives makes modeling high-frequency detail challenging. We introduce Neural Harmonic Textures, a neural representation approach that anchors latent feature vectors on a virtual scaffold surrounding each primitive. These features are interpolated within the primitive at ray intersection points. Inspired by Fourier analysis, we apply periodic activations to the interpolated features, turning alpha blending into a weighted sum of harmonic components. The resulting signal is then decoded in a single deferred pass using a small neural network, significantly reducing computational cost. Neural Harmonic Textures yield state-of-the-art results in real-time novel view synthesis while bridging the gap between primitive- and neural-field-based reconstruction. Our method integrates seamlessly into existing primitive-based pipelines such as 3DGUT, Triangle Splatting, and 2DGS. We further demonstrate its generality with applications to 2D image fitting and semantic reconstruction.

☆ Learning and Generating Mixed States Prepared by Shallow Channel Circuits

Fangjun Hu, Christian Kokail, Milan Kornjača, Pedro L. S. Lopes, Weiyuan Gong, Sheng-Tao Wang, Xun Gao, Stefan Ostermann

Learning quantum states from measurement data is a central problem in quantum information and computational complexity. In this work, we study the problem of learning to generate mixed states on a finite-dimensional lattice. Motivated by recent developments in mixed state phases of matter, we focus on arbitrary states in the trivial phase. A state belongs to the trivial phase if there exists a shallow preparation channel circuit under which local reversibility is preserved throughout the preparation. We prove that any mixed state in this class can be efficiently learned from measurement access alone. Specifically, given copies of an unknown trivial phase mixed state, our algorithm outputs a shallow local channel circuit that approximately generates this state in trace distance. The sample complexity and runtime are polynomial (or quasi-polynomial) in the number of qubits, assuming constant (or polylogarithmic) circuit depth and gate locality. Importantly, the learner is not given the original preparation circuit and relies only on its existence. Our results provide a structural foundation for quantum generative models based on shallow channel circuits. In the classical limit, our framework also inspires an efficient algorithm for classical diffusion models using only a polynomial overhead of training and generation.

comment: 44 pages, 13 figures, 1 table

☆ Screening Is Enough

Ken M. Nakanishi

A core limitation of standard softmax attention is that it does not define a notion of absolute query--key relevance: attention weights are obtained by redistributing a fixed unit mass across all keys according to their relative scores. As a result, relevance is defined only relative to competing keys, and irrelevant keys cannot be explicitly rejected. We introduce Multiscreen, a language-model architecture built around a mechanism we call screening, which enables absolute query--key relevance. Instead of redistributing attention across all keys, screening evaluates each key against an explicit threshold, discarding irrelevant keys and aggregating the remaining keys, thereby removing global competition among keys. Across experiments, Multiscreen achieves comparable validation loss with approximately 40% fewer parameters than a Transformer baseline, enables stable optimization at substantially larger learning rates, maintains strong performance in long-context perplexity, shows little to no degradation in retrieval performance even far beyond the training context length, and reduces inference latency by up to 3.2$\times$ at 100K context length.

comment: 21 pages, 13 figures

☆ NeuroDDAF: Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields with Evidential Fusion for Air Quality Forecasting

Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Angela Meyer, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for protecting public health and guiding environmental policy, yet it remains challenging due to nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics, wind-driven transport, and distribution shifts across regions. Physics-based models are interpretable but computationally expensive and often rely on restrictive assumptions, whereas purely data-driven models can be accurate but may lack robustness and calibrated uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields (NeuroDDAF), a physics-informed forecasting framework that unifies neural representation learning with open-system transport modeling. NeuroDDAF integrates (i) a GRU-Graph Attention encoder to capture temporal dynamics and wind-aware spatial interactions, (ii) a Fourier-domain diffusion-advection module with learnable residuals, (iii) a wind-modulated latent Neural ODE to model continuous-time evolution under time-varying connectivity, and (iv) an evidential fusion mechanism that adaptively combines physics-guided and neural forecasts while quantifying uncertainty. Experiments on four urban datasets (Beijing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Ancona) across 1-3 day horizons show that NeuroDDAF consistently outperforms strong baselines, including AirPhyNet, achieving up to 9.7% reduction in RMSE and 9.4% reduction in MAE on long-term forecasts. On the Beijing dataset, NeuroDDAF attains an RMSE of 41.63 $μ$g/m$^3$ for 1-day prediction and 48.88 $μ$g/m$^3$ for 3-day prediction, representing the best performance among all compared methods. In addition, NeuroDDAF improves cross-city generalization and yields well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, as confirmed by ensemble variance analysis and case studies under varying wind conditions.

comment: This manuscript is under review

☆ Safe learning-based control via function-based uncertainty quantification

Abdullah Tokmak, Toni Karvonen, Thomas B. Schön, Dominik Baumann

Uncertainty quantification is essential when deploying learning-based control methods in safety-critical systems. This is commonly realized by constructing uncertainty tubes that enclose the unknown function of interest, e.g., the reward and constraint functions or the underlying dynamics model, with high probability. However, existing approaches for uncertainty quantification typically rely on restrictive assumptions on the unknown function, such as known bounds on functional norms or Lipschitz constants, and struggle with discontinuities. In this paper, we model the unknown function as a random function from which independent and identically distributed realizations can be generated, and construct uncertainty tubes via the scenario approach that hold with high probability and rely solely on the sampled realizations. We integrate these uncertainty tubes into a safe Bayesian optimization algorithm, which we then use to safely tune control parameters on a real Furuta pendulum.

comment: Under review for CDC 2026

☆ Online Reasoning Calibration: Test-Time Training Enables Generalizable Conformal LLM Reasoning

Cai Zhou, Zekai Wang, Menghua Wu, Qianyu Julie Zhu, Flora C. Shi, Chenyu Wang, Ashia Wilson, Tommi Jaakkola, Stephen Bates

While test-time scaling has enabled large language models to solve highly difficult tasks, state-of-the-art results come at exorbitant compute costs. These inefficiencies can be attributed to the miscalibration of post-trained language models, and the lack of calibration in popular sampling techniques. Here, we present Online Reasoning Calibration (ORCA), a framework for calibrating the sampling process that draws upon conformal prediction and test-time training. Specifically, we introduce a meta-learning procedure that updates the calibration module for each input. This allows us to provide valid confidence estimates under distributional shift, e.g. in thought patterns that occur across different stages of reasoning, or in prompt distributions between model development and deployment. ORCA not only provides theoretical guarantees on conformal risks, but also empirically shows higher efficiency and generalization across different reasoning tasks. At risk level $δ=0.1$, ORCA improves Qwen2.5-32B efficiency on in-distribution tasks with savings up to 47.5% with supervised labels and 40.7% with self-consistency labels. Under zero-shot out-of-domain settings, it improves MATH-500 savings from 24.8% of the static calibration baseline to 67.0% while maintaining a low empirical error rate, and the same trend holds across model families and downstream benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wzekai99/ORCA.

comment: 20 pages

☆ Bridging the Simulation-to-Experiment Gap with Generative Models using Adversarial Distribution Alignment

Kai Nelson, Tobias Kreiman, Sergey Levine, Aditi S. Krishnapriyan

A fundamental challenge in science and engineering is the simulation-to-experiment gap. While we often possess prior knowledge of physical laws, these physical laws can be too difficult to solve exactly for complex systems. Such systems are commonly modeled using simulators, which impose computational approximations. Meanwhile, experimental measurements more faithfully represent the real world, but experimental data typically consists of observations that only partially reflect the system's full underlying state. We propose a data-driven distribution alignment framework that bridges this simulation-to-experiment gap by pre-training a generative model on fully observed (but imperfect) simulation data, then aligning it with partial (but real) observations of experimental data. While our method is domain-agnostic, we ground our approach in the physical sciences by introducing Adversarial Distribution Alignment (ADA). This method aligns a generative model of atomic positions -- initially trained on a simulated Boltzmann distribution -- with the distribution of experimental observations. We prove that our method recovers the target observable distribution, even with multiple, potentially correlated observables. We also empirically validate our framework on synthetic, molecular, and experimental protein data, demonstrating that it can align generative models with diverse observables. Our code is available at https://kaityrusnelson.com/ada/.

☆ S0 Tuning: Zero-Overhead Adaptation of Hybrid Recurrent-Attention Models

Jack Young

Using roughly 48 execution-verified HumanEval training solutions, tuning a single initial state matrix per recurrent layer, with zero inference overhead, outperforms LoRA by +10.8 pp (p < 0.001) on HumanEval. The method, which we call S0 tuning, optimizes one state matrix per recurrent layer while freezing all model weights. On Qwen3.5-4B (GatedDeltaNet hybrid), S0 tuning improves greedy pass@1 by +23.6 +/- 1.7 pp (10 seeds). On FalconH1-7B (Mamba-2 hybrid), S0 reaches 71.8% +/- 1.3 and LoRA reaches 71.4% +/- 2.4 (3 seeds), statistically indistinguishable at this sample size while requiring no weight merging. Cross-domain transfer is significant on MATH-500 (+4.8 pp, p = 0.00002, 8 seeds) and GSM8K (+2.8 pp, p = 0.0003, 10 seeds); a text-to-SQL benchmark (Spider) shows no transfer, consistent with the trajectory-steering mechanism. A prefix-tuning control on a pure Transformer (Qwen2.5-3B) degrades performance by -13.9 pp under all nine configurations tested. On Qwen3.5, a per-step state-offset variant reaches +27.1 pp, above both S0 and LoRA but with per-step inference cost. Taken together, the results show that recurrent state initialization is a strong zero-inference-overhead PEFT surface for hybrid language models when verified supervision is scarce. The tuned state is a ~48 MB file; task switching requires no weight merging or model reload. Code and library: https://github.com/jackyoung27/s0-tuning.

comment: 15 pages (10 main + 5 appendix), 3 figures, code at https://github.com/jackyoung27/s0-tuning

☆ Reasoning Shift: How Context Silently Shortens LLM Reasoning

Gleb Rodionov

Large language models (LLMs) exhibiting test-time scaling behavior, such as extended reasoning traces and self-verification, have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex, long-term reasoning tasks. However, the robustness of these reasoning behaviors remains underexplored. To investigate this, we conduct a systematic evaluation of multiple reasoning models across three scenarios: (1) problems augmented with lengthy, irrelevant context; (2) multi-turn conversational settings with independent tasks; and (3) problems presented as a subtask within a complex task. We observe an interesting phenomenon: reasoning models tend to produce much shorter reasoning traces (up to 50%) for the same problem under different context conditions compared to the traces produced when the problem is presented in isolation. A finer-grained analysis reveals that this compression is associated with a decrease in self-verification and uncertainty management behaviors, such as double-checking. While this behavioral shift does not compromise performance on straightforward problems, it might affect performance on more challenging tasks. We hope our findings draw additional attention to both the robustness of reasoning models and the problem of context management for LLMs and LLM-based agents.

comment: Preprint, work in progress

☆ Property-Level Flood Risk Assessment Using AI-Enabled Street-View Lowest Floor Elevation Extraction and ML Imputation Across Texas

Xiangpeng Li, Yu-Hsuan Ho, Sam D Brody, Ali Mostafavi

This paper argues that AI-enabled analysis of street-view imagery, complemented by performance-gated machine-learning imputation, provides a viable pathway for generating building-specific elevation data at regional scale for flood risk assessment. We develop and apply a three-stage pipeline across 18 areas of interest (AOIs) in Texas that (1) extracts LFE and the height difference between street grade and the lowest floor (HDSL) from Google Street View imagery using the Elev-Vision framework, (2) imputes missing HDSL values with Random Forest and Gradient Boosting models trained on 16 terrain, hydrologic, geographic, and flood-exposure features, and (3) integrates the resulting elevation dataset with Fathom 1-in-100 year inundation surfaces and USACE depth-damage functions to estimate property-specific interior flood depth and expected loss. Across 12,241 residential structures, street-view imagery was available for 73.4% of parcels and direct LFE/HDSL extraction was successful for 49.0% (5,992 structures). Imputation was retained for 13 AOIs where cross-validated performance was defensible, with selected models achieving R suqre values from 0.159 to 0.974; five AOIs were explicitly excluded from prediction because performance was insufficient. The results show that street-view-based elevation mapping is not universally available for every property, but it is sufficiently scalable to materially improve regional flood-risk characterization by moving beyond hazard exposure to structure-level estimates of interior inundation and expected damage. Scientifically, the study advances LFE estimation from a pilot-scale proof of concept to a regional, end-to-end workflow. Practically, it offers a replicable framework for jurisdictions that lack comprehensive Elevation Certificates but need parcel-level information to support mitigation, planning, and flood-risk management.

☆ Detecting Multi-Agent Collusion Through Multi-Agent Interpretability

Aaron Rose, Carissa Cullen, Brandon Gary Kaplowitz, Christian Schroeder de Witt

As LLM agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems, they introduce risks of covert coordination that may evade standard forms of human oversight. While linear probes on model activations have shown promise for detecting deception in single-agent settings, collusion is inherently a multi-agent phenomenon, and the use of internal representations for detecting collusion between agents remains unexplored. We introduce NARCBench, a benchmark for evaluating collusion detection under environment distribution shift, and propose five probing techniques that aggregate per-agent deception scores to classify scenarios at the group level. Our probes achieve 1.00 AUROC in-distribution and 0.60--0.86 AUROC when transferred zero-shot to structurally different multi-agent scenarios and a steganographic blackjack card-counting task. We find that no single probing technique dominates across all collusion types, suggesting that different forms of collusion manifest differently in activation space. We also find preliminary evidence that this signal is localised at the token level, with the colluding agent's activations spiking specifically when processing the encoded parts of their partner's message. This work takes a step toward multi-agent interpretability: extending white-box inspection from single models to multi-agent contexts, where detection requires aggregating signals across agents. These results suggest that model internals provide a complementary signal to text-level monitoring for detecting multi-agent collusion, particularly for organisations with access to model activations. Code and data are available at https://github.com/aaronrose227/narcbench.

☆ Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation under Distribution Shift with Bounded Extremum Seeking

Shaifalee Saxena, Rafael Fierro, Alexander Scheinker

Reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but learned policies often degrade in performance when test conditions differ from the training distribution. This limitation is especially important in contact-rich tasks such as pushing and pick-and-place, where changes in goals, contact conditions, or robot dynamics can drive the system out-of-distribution at inference time. In this paper, we investigate a hybrid controller that combines reinforcement learning with bounded extremum seeking to improve robustness under such conditions. In the proposed approach, deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) policies are trained under standard conditions on the robotic pushing and pick-and-place tasks, and are then combined with bounded ES during deployment. The RL policy provides fast manipulation behavior, while bounded ES ensures robustness of the overall controller to time variations when operating conditions depart from those seen during training. The resulting controller is evaluated under several out-of-distribution settings, including time-varying goals and spatially varying friction patches.

☆ Toward Personalized Darts Training: A Data-Driven Framework Based on Skeleton-Based Biomechanical Analysis and Motion Modeling

Zhantao Chen, Dongyi He, Jin Fang, Xi Chen, Yisuo Liu, Xiaozhen Zhong, Xuejun Hu

As sports training becomes more data-driven, traditional dart coaching based mainly on experience and visual observation is increasingly inadequate for high-precision, goal-oriented movements. Although prior studies have highlighted the importance of release parameters, joint motion, and coordination in dart throwing, most quantitative methods still focus on local variables, single-release metrics, or static template matching. These approaches offer limited support for personalized training and often overlook useful movement variability. This paper presents a data-driven dart training assistance system. The system creates a closed-loop framework spanning motion capture, feature modeling, and personalized feedback. Dart-throwing data were collected in markerless conditions using a Kinect 2.0 depth sensor and an optical camera. Eighteen kinematic features were extracted from four biomechanical dimensions: three-link coordination, release velocity, multi-joint angular configuration, and postural stability. Two modules were developed: a personalized optimal throwing trajectory model that combines historical high-quality samples with the minimum jerk criterion, and a motion deviation diagnosis and recommendation model based on z-scores and hierarchical logic. A total of 2,396 throwing samples from professional and non-professional athletes were collected. Results show that the system generates smooth personalized reference trajectories consistent with natural human movement. Case studies indicate that it can detect poor trunk stability, abnormal elbow displacement, and imbalanced velocity control, then provide targeted recommendations. The framework shifts dart evaluation from deviation from a uniform standard to deviation from an individual's optimal control range, improving personalization and interpretability for darts training and other high-precision target sports.

☆ Paper Reconstruction Evaluation: Evaluating Presentation and Hallucination in AI-written Papers

Atsuyuki Miyai, Mashiro Toyooka, Zaiying Zhao, Kenta Watanabe, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Kiyoharu Aizawa

This paper introduces the first systematic evaluation framework for quantifying the quality and risks of papers written by modern coding agents. While AI-driven paper writing has become a growing concern, rigorous evaluation of the quality and potential risks of AI-written papers remains limited, and a unified understanding of their reliability is still lacking. We introduce Paper Reconstruction Evaluation (PaperRecon), an evaluation framework in which an overview (overview.md) is created from an existing paper, after which an agent generates a full paper based on the overview and minimal additional resources, and the result is subsequently compared against the original paper. PaperRecon disentangles the evaluation of the AI-written papers into two orthogonal dimensions, Presentation and Hallucination, where Presentation is evaluated using a rubric and Hallucination is assessed via agentic evaluation grounded in the original paper source. For evaluation, we introduce PaperWrite-Bench, a benchmark of 51 papers from top-tier venues across diverse domains published after 2025. Our experiments reveal a clear trade-off: while both ClaudeCode and Codex improve with model advances, ClaudeCode achieves higher presentation quality at the cost of more than 10 hallucinations per paper on average, whereas Codex produces fewer hallucinations but lower presentation quality. This work takes a first step toward establishing evaluation frameworks for AI-driven paper writing and improving the understanding of its risks within the research community.

comment: Project Page: https://agent4science-utokyo.github.io/PaperRecon_HP/

☆ Lightweight Prompt-Guided CLIP Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation

Reyhaneh Ahani Manghotay, Jie Liang

Leveraging the rich semantic features of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP for monocular depth estimation tasks is a promising direction, yet often requires extensive fine-tuning or lacks geometric precision. We present a parameter-efficient framework, named MoA-DepthCLIP, that adapts pretrained CLIP representations for monocular depth estimation with minimal supervision. Our method integrates a lightweight Mixture-of-Adapters (MoA) module into the pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT-B/32) backbone combined with selective fine-tuning of the final layers. This design enables spatially-aware adaptation, guided by a global semantic context vector and a hybrid prediction architecture that synergizes depth bin classification with direct regression. To enhance structural accuracy, we employ a composite loss function that enforces geometric constraints. On the NYU Depth V2 benchmark, MoA-DepthCLIP achieves competitive results, significantly outperforming the DepthCLIP baseline by improving the $δ_1$ accuracy from 0.390 to 0.745 and reducing the RMSE from 1.176 to 0.520. These results are achieved while requiring substantially few trainable parameters, demonstrating that lightweight, prompt-guided MoA is a highly effective strategy for transferring VLM knowledge to fine-grained monocular depth estimation tasks.

comment: 14 pages, 2 figures

☆ Reconsidering Dependency Networks from an Information Geometry Perspective

Kazuya Takabatake, Shotaro Akaho

Dependency networks (Heckerman et al., 2000) provide a flexible framework for modeling complex systems with many variables by combining independently learned local conditional distributions through pseudo-Gibbs sampling. Despite their computational advantages over Bayesian and Markov networks, the theoretical foundations of dependency networks remain incomplete, primarily because their model distributions -- defined as stationary distributions of pseudo-Gibbs sampling -- lack closed-form expressions. This paper develops an information-geometric analysis of pseudo-Gibbs sampling, interpreting each sampling step as an m-projection onto a full conditional manifold. Building on this interpretation, we introduce the full conditional divergence and derive an upper bound that characterizes the location of the stationary distribution in the space of probability distributions. We then reformulate both structure and parameter learning as optimization problems that decompose into independent subproblems for each node, and prove that the learned model distribution converges to the true underlying distribution as the number of training samples grows to infinity. Experiments confirm that the proposed upper bound is tight in practice.

comment: 25 papers, 7 figures

☆ Inverse Design of Optical Multilayer Thin Films using Robust Masked Diffusion Models

Jonas Schaible, Asena Karolin Özdemir, Charlotte Debus, Sven Burger, Achim Streit, Christiane Becker, Klaus Jäger, Markus Götz

Inverse design of optical multilayer stacks seeks to infer layer materials, thicknesses, and ordering from a desired target spectrum. It is a long-standing challenge due to the large design space and non-unique solutions. We introduce \texttt{OptoLlama}, a masked diffusion language model for inverse thin-film design from optical spectra. Representing multilayer stacks as sequences of material-thickness tokens, \texttt{OptoLlama} conditions generation on reflectance, absorptance, and transmittance spectra and learns a probabilistic mapping from optical response to structure. Evaluated on a representative test set of 3,000 targets, \texttt{OptoLlama} reduces the mean absolute spectral error by 2.9-fold relative to a nearest-neighbor template baseline and by 3.45-fold relative to the state-of-the-art data-driven baseline, called \texttt{OptoGPT}. Case studies on designed and expert-defined targets show that the model reproduces characteristic spectral features and recovers physically meaningful stack motifs, including distributed Bragg reflectors. These results establish diffusion-based sequence modeling as a powerful framework for inverse photonic design.

comment: 24 pages, 14 Figures

☆ Approximating Pareto Frontiers in Stochastic Multi-Objective Optimization via Hashing and Randomization

Jinzhao Li, Nan Jiang, Yexiang Xue

Stochastic Multi-Objective Optimization (SMOO) is critical for decision-making trading off multiple potentially conflicting objectives in uncertain environments. SMOO aims at identifying the Pareto frontier, which contains all mutually non-dominating decisions. The problem is highly intractable due to the embedded probabilistic inference, such as computing the marginal, posterior probabilities, or expectations. Existing methods, such as scalarization, sample average approximation, and evolutionary algorithms, either offer arbitrarily loose approximations or may incur prohibitive computational costs. We propose XOR-SMOO, a novel algorithm that with probability $1-δ$, obtains $γ$-approximate Pareto frontiers ($γ>1$) for SMOO by querying an SAT oracle poly-log times in $γ$ and $δ$. A $γ$-approximate Pareto frontier is only below the true frontier by a fixed, multiplicative factor $γ$. Thus, XOR-SMOO solves highly intractable SMOO problems (\#P-hard) with only queries to SAT oracles while obtaining tight, constant factor approximation guarantees. Experiments on real-world road network strengthening and supply chain design problems demonstrate that XOR-SMOO outperforms several baselines in identifying Pareto frontiers that have higher objective values, better coverage of the optimal solutions, and the solutions found are more evenly distributed. Overall, XOR-SMOO significantly enhanced the practicality and reliability of SMOO solvers.

☆ ProOOD: Prototype-Guided Out-of-Distribution 3D Occupancy Prediction CVPR 2026

Yuheng Zhang, Mengfei Duan, Kunyu Peng, Yuhang Wang, Di Wen, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Kailun Yang

3D semantic occupancy prediction is central to autonomous driving, yet current methods are vulnerable to long-tailed class bias and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, often overconfidently assigning anomalies to rare classes. We present ProOOD, a lightweight, plug-and-play method that couples prototype-guided refinement with training-free OOD scoring. ProOOD comprises (i) prototype-guided semantic imputation that fills occluded regions with class-consistent features, (ii) prototype-guided tail mining that strengthens rare-class representations to curb OOD absorption, and (iii) EchoOOD, which fuses local logit coherence with local and global prototype matching to produce reliable voxel-level OOD scores. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that ProOOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution 3D occupancy prediction and OOD detection. On SemanticKITTI, it surpasses baselines by +3.57% mIoU overall and +24.80% tail-class mIoU; on VAA-KITTI, it improves AuPRCr by +19.34 points, with consistent gains across benchmarks. These improvements yield more calibrated occupancy estimates and more reliable OOD detection in safety-critical urban driving. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/7uHeng/ProOOD.

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/7uHeng/ProOOD

☆ Fast and Accurate Probing of In-Training LLMs' Downstream Performances

Zhichen Liu, Tianle Lun, Zhibin Wen, Hao An, Yulin Ou, Jianhui Xu, Hao Zhang, Wenyi Fang, Yang Zheng, Yang Xu

The paradigm of scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) in both parameter size and test time has pushed the boundaries of AI capabilities, but at the cost of making the traditional generative evaluation paradigm prohibitively expensive, therefore making the latency of LLM's in-training downstream performance evaluation unbearable. However, simple metrics like training loss (perplexity) are not always correlated with downstream performance, as sometimes their trends diverge from the actual task outcomes. This dilemma calls for a method that is computationally efficient and sufficiently accurate in measuring model capabilities. To address this challenge, we introduce a new in-training evaluation paradigm that uses a lightweight probe for monitoring downstream performance. The probes take the internal representations of LLM checkpoints (during training) as input and directly predict the checkpoint's performance on downstream tasks measured by success probability (i.e., pass@1). We design several probe architectures, validating their effectiveness using the OLMo3-7B's checkpoints across a diverse set of downstream tasks. The probes can accurately predict a checkpoint's performance (with avg. AUROC$>$0.75), have decent generalizability across checkpoints (earlier predicts later), and reduce the computation latency from $\sim$1 hr (using conventional generative evaluation method) to $\sim$3 min. In sum, this work presents a practical and scalable in-training downstream evaluation paradigm, enabling a more agile, informed, and efficient LLM development process.

☆ Model-Based Learning of Near-Optimal Finite-Window Policies in POMDPs

Philip Jordan, Maryam Kamgarpour

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using finite action-observation windows. This induces a finite-state Markov decision process (MDP) over histories, referred to as the superstate MDP. Once a model of this superstate MDP is available, standard MDP algorithms can be used to compute optimal policies, motivating the need for sample-efficient model estimation. Estimating the superstate MDP model is challenging because trajectories are generated by interaction with the original POMDP, creating a mismatch between the sampling process and target model. We propose a model estimation procedure for tabular POMDPs and analyze its sample complexity. Our analysis exploits a connection between filter stability and concentration inequalities for weakly dependent random variables. As a result, we obtain tight sample complexity guarantees for estimating the superstate MDP model from a single trajectory. Combined with value iteration, this yields approximately optimal finite-window policies for the POMDP.

☆ Transfer learning for nonparametric Bayesian networks

Rafael Sojo, Pedro Larrañaga, Concha Bielza

This paper introduces two transfer learning methodologies for estimating nonparametric Bayesian networks under scarce data. We propose two algorithms, a constraint-based structure learning method, called PC-stable-transfer learning (PCS-TL), and a score-based method, called hill climbing transfer learning (HC-TL). We also define particular metrics to tackle the negative transfer problem in each of them, a situation in which transfer learning has a negative impact on the model's performance. Then, for the parameters, we propose a log-linear pooling approach. For the evaluation, we learn kernel density estimation Bayesian networks, a type of nonparametric Bayesian network, and compare their transfer learning performance with the models alone. To do so, we sample data from small, medium and large-sized synthetic networks and datasets from the UCI Machine Learning repository. Then, we add noise and modifications to these datasets to test their ability to avoid negative transfer. To conclude, we perform a Friedman test with a Bergmann-Hommel post-hoc analysis to show statistical proof of the enhanced experimental behavior of our methods. Thus, PCS-TL and HC-TL demonstrate to be reliable algorithms for improving the learning performance of a nonparametric Bayesian network with scarce data, which in real industrial environments implies a reduction in the required time to deploy the network.

comment: An earlier version was previously posted on SSRN. This version includes improvements in experiments and evaluation metrics following reviewer comments. Revision submitted to Knowledge-Based Systems

☆ Query-Conditioned Evidential Keyframe Sampling for MLLM-Based Long-Form Video Understanding

Yiheng Wang, Lichen Zhu, Yueqian Lin, Yudong Liu, Jingyang Zhang, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on video question answering, but their application to long-form videos is constrained by limited context length and computational cost, making keyframe sampling essential. Existing approaches typically rely on semantic relevance or reinforcement learning, which either fail to capture evidential clues or suffer from inefficient combinatorial optimization. In this work, we propose an evidence-driven keyframe sampling framework grounded in information bottleneck theory. We formulate keyframe selection as maximizing the conditional mutual information between selected frames and the query, providing a principled objective that reflects each frame's contribution to answering the question. To make this objective tractable, we exploit its structure to derive a decomposed optimization that reduces subset selection to independent frame-level scoring. We further introduce a query-conditioned evidence scoring network trained with a contrastive objective to estimate evidential importance efficiently. Experiments on long-form video understanding benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms prior sampling strategies under strict token budgets, while significantly improving training efficiency.

☆ EmbedPart: Embedding-Driven Graph Partitioning for Scalable Graph Neural Network Training

Nikolai Merkel, Ruben Mayer, Volker Markl, Hans-Arno Jacobsen

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used for learning on graph-structured data, but scaling GNN training to massive graphs remains challenging. To enable scalable distributed training, graphs are divided into smaller partitions that are distributed across multiple machines such that inter-machine communication is minimized and computational load is balanced. In practice, existing partitioning approaches face a fundamental trade-off between partitioning overhead and partitioning quality. We propose EmbedPart, an embedding-driven partitioning approach that achieves both speed and quality. Instead of operating directly on irregular graph structures, EmbedPart leverages node embeddings produced during the actual GNN training workload and clusters these dense embeddings to derive a partitioning. EmbedPart achieves more than 100x speedup over Metis while maintaining competitive partitioning quality and accelerating distributed GNN training. Moreover, EmbedPart naturally supports graph updates and fast repartitioning, and can be applied to graph reordering to improve data locality and accelerate single-machine GNN training. By shifting partitioning from irregular graph structures to dense embeddings, EmbedPart enables scalable and high-quality graph data optimization.

☆ Focal plane wavefront control with model-based reinforcement learning

Jalo Nousiainen, Iremsu Taskin, Markus Kasper, Gilles Orban De Xivry, Olivier Absil

The direct imaging of potentially habitable exoplanets is one prime science case for high-contrast imaging instruments on extremely large telescopes. Most such exoplanets orbit close to their host stars, where their observation is limited by fast-moving atmospheric speckles and quasi-static non-common-path aberrations (NCPA). Conventional NCPA correction methods often use mechanical mirror probes, which compromise performance during operation. This work presents machine-learning-based NCPA control methods that automatically detect and correct both dynamic and static NCPA errors by leveraging sequential phase diversity. We extend previous work in reinforcement learning for AO to focal plane control. A new model-based RL algorithm, Policy Optimization for NCPAs (PO4NCPA), interprets the focal-plane image as input data and, through sequential phase diversity, determines phase corrections that optimize both non-coronagraphic and post-coronagraphic PSFs without prior system knowledge. Further, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by numerically simulating static NCPA errors on a ground-based telescope and an infrared imager affected by water-vapor-induced seeing (dynamic NCPAs). Simulations show that PO4NCPA robustly compensates static and dynamic NCPAs. In static cases, it achieves near-optimal focal-plane light suppression with a coronagraph and near-optimal Strehl without one. With dynamics NCPA, it matches the performance of the modal least-squares reconstruction combined with a 1-step delay integrator in these metrics. The method remains effective for the ELT pupil, vector vortex coronagraph, and under photon and background noise. PO4NCPA is model-free and can be directly applied to standard imaging as well as to any coronagraph. Its sub-millisecond inference times and performance also make it suitable for real-time low-order correction of atmospheric turbulence beyond HCI.

comment: 13 pages, 11 figures accepted by A&A

☆ Bridging Structured Knowledge and Data: A Unified Framework with Finance Applications

Yi Cao, Zexun Chen, Lin William Cong, Heqing Shi

We develop Structured-Knowledge-Informed Neural Networks (SKINNs), a unified estimation framework that embeds theoretical, simulated, previously learned, or cross-domain insights as differentiable constraints within flexible neural function approximation. SKINNs jointly estimate neural network parameters and economically meaningful structural parameters in a single optimization problem, enforcing theoretical consistency not only on observed data but over a broader input domain through collocation, and therefore nesting approaches such as functional GMM, Bayesian updating, transfer learning, PINNs, and surrogate modeling. SKINNs define a class of M-estimators that are consistent and asymptotically normal with root-N convergence, sandwich covariance, and recovery of pseudo-true parameters under misspecification. We establish identification of structural parameters under joint flexibility, derive generalization and target-risk bounds under distributional shift in a convex proxy, and provide a restricted-optimal characterization of the weighting parameter that governs the bias-variance tradeoff. In an illustrative financial application to option pricing, SKINNs improve out-of-sample valuation and hedging performance, particularly at longer horizons and during high-volatility regimes, while recovering economically interpretable structural parameters with improved stability relative to conventional calibration. More broadly, SKINNs provide a general econometric framework for combining model-based reasoning with high-dimensional, data-driven estimation.

☆ Do Phone-Use Agents Respect Your Privacy?

Zhengyang Tang, Ke Ji, Xidong Wang, Zihan Ye, Xinyuan Wang, Yiduo Guo, Ziniu Li, Chenxin Li, Jingyuan Hu, Shunian Chen, Tongxu Luo, Jiaxi Bi, Zeyu Qin, Shaobo Wang, Xin Lai, Pengyuan Lyu, Junyi Li, Can Xu, Chengquan Zhang, Han Hu, Ming Yan, Benyou Wang

We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not reveal exactly what data agents type into which form entries during execution. To make this question measurable, we introduce MyPhoneBench, a verifiable evaluation framework for privacy behavior in mobile agents. We operationalize privacy-respecting phone use as permissioned access, minimal disclosure, and user-controlled memory through a minimal privacy contract, iMy, and pair it with instrumented mock apps plus rule-based auditing that make unnecessary permission requests, deceptive re-disclosure, and unnecessary form filling observable and reproducible. Across five frontier models on 10 mobile apps and 300 tasks, we find that task success, privacy-compliant task completion, and later-session use of saved preferences are distinct capabilities, and no single model dominates all three. Evaluating success and privacy jointly reshuffles the model ordering relative to either metric alone. The most persistent failure mode across models is simple data minimization: agents still fill optional personal entries that the task does not require. These results show that privacy failures arise from over-helpful execution of benign tasks, and that success-only evaluation overestimates the deployment readiness of current phone-use agents. All code, mock apps, and agent trajectories are publicly available at~ https://github.com/tangzhy/MyPhoneBench.

comment: work in progress

☆ Flow-based Policy With Distributional Reinforcement Learning in Trajectory Optimization

Ruijie Hao, Longfei Zhang, Yang Dai, Yang Ma, Xingxing Liang, Guangquan Cheng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which constrains the policy from capturing multimodal distributions, making it difficult to cover the full range of optimal solutions in multi-solution problems, and the return is reduced to a mean value, losing its multimodal nature and thus providing insufficient guidance for policy updates. In response to these problems, we propose a RL algorithm termed flow-based policy with distributional RL (FP-DRL). This algorithm models the policy using flow matching, which offers both computational efficiency and the capacity to fit complex distributions. Additionally, it employs a distributional RL approach to model and optimize the entire return distribution, thereby more effectively guiding multimodal policy updates and improving agent performance. Experimental trails on MuJoCo benchmarks demonstrate that the FP-DRL algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in most MuJoCo control tasks while exhibiting superior representation capability of the flow policy.

☆ Rapid mixing in positively weighted restricted Boltzmann machines

Weiming Feng, Heng Guo, Minji Yang

We show polylogarithmic mixing time bounds for the alternating-scan sampler for positively weighted restricted Boltzmann machines. This is done via analysing the same chain and the Glauber dynamics for ferromagnetic two-spin systems, where we obtain new mixing time bounds up to the critical thresholds.

☆ Differentially Private Manifold Denoising

Jiaqi Wu, Yiqing Sun, Zhigang Yao

We introduce a differentially private manifold denoising framework that allows users to exploit sensitive reference datasets to correct noisy, non-private query points without compromising privacy. The method follows an iterative procedure that (i) privately estimates local means and tangent geometry using the reference data under calibrated sensitivity, (ii) projects query points along the privately estimated subspace toward the local mean via corrective steps at each iteration, and (iii) performs rigorous privacy accounting across iterations and queries using $(\varepsilon,δ)$-differential privacy (DP). Conceptually, this framework brings differential privacy to manifold methods, retaining sufficient geometric signal for downstream tasks such as embedding, clustering, and visualization, while providing formal DP guarantees for the reference data. Practically, the procedure is modular and scalable, separating DP-protected local geometry (means and tangents) from budgeted query-point updates, with a simple scheduler allocating privacy budget across iterations and queries. Under standard assumptions on manifold regularity, sampling density, and measurement noise, we establish high-probability utility guarantees showing that corrected queries converge toward the manifold at a non-asymptotic rate governed by sample size, noise level, bandwidth, and the privacy budget. Simulations and case studies demonstrate accurate signal recovery under moderate privacy budgets, illustrating clear utility-privacy trade-offs and providing a deployable DP component for manifold-based workflows in regulated environments without reengineering privacy systems.

comment: 59 pages

☆ WARP: Guaranteed Inner-Layer Repair of NLP Transformers

Hsin-Ling Hsu, Min-Yu Chen, Nai-Chia Chen, Yan-Ru Chen, Yi-Ling Chang, Fang Yu

Transformer-based NLP models remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, yet existing repair methods face a fundamental trade-off: gradient-based approaches offer flexibility but lack verifiability and often overfit; methods that do provide repair guarantees are restricted to the final layer or small networks, significantly limiting the parameter search space available for repair. We present WARP (Weight-Adjusted Repair with Provability), a constraint-based repair framework that extends repair beyond the last layer of Transformer models. WARP formulates repair as a convex quadratic program derived from a first-order linearization of the logit gap, enabling tractable optimization over a high-dimensional parameter space. Under the condition that the first-order approximation holds, this formulation induces three per-sample guarantees: (i) a positive margin constraint ensuring correct classification on repaired inputs, (ii) preservation constraints over a designated remain set, and (iii) a certified robustness radius derived from Lipschitz continuity. To ensure feasibility across varying model architectures, we introduce a sensitivity-based preprocessing step that conditions the optimization landscape accordingly. We further show that the iterative optimization procedure converges to solutions satisfying all repair constraints under mild assumptions. Empirical evaluation on encoder-only Transformers with varying layer architectures validates that these guarantees hold in practice while improving robustness to adversarial inputs. Our results demonstrate that guaranteed, generalizable Transformer repair is achievable through principled constraint-based optimization.

☆ Multi-Mode Quantum Annealing for Variational Autoencoders with General Boltzmann Priors

Gilhan Kim, Daniel K. Park

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn compact latent representations of complex data, but their generative capacity is fundamentally constrained by the choice of prior distribution over the latent space. Energy-based priors offer a principled way to move beyond factorized assumptions and capture structured interactions among latent variables, yet training such priors at scale requires accurate and efficient sampling from intractable distributions. Here we present Boltzmann-machine--prior VAEs (BM-VAEs) trained using quantum annealing--based sampling in three distinct operational modes within a single generative system. During training, diabatic quantum annealing (DQA) provides unbiased Boltzmann samples for gradient estimation of the energy-based prior; for unconditional generation, slower quantum annealing (QA) concentrates samples near low-energy minima; for conditional generation, bias fields are added to direct sampling toward attribute-specific regions of the energy landscape (c-QA). Using up to 2000 qubits on a D-Wave Advantage2 processor, we demonstrate stable and efficient training across multiple datasets, with faster convergence and lower reconstruction loss than a Gaussian-prior VAE. The learned Boltzmann prior enables unconditional generation by sampling directly from the energy-based latent distribution, a capability that plain autoencoders lack, and conditional generation through latent biasing that leverages the learned pairwise interactions.

comment: 17 pages, 6 figures

☆ Generalization Bounds for Spectral GNNs via Fourier Domain Analysis

Vahan A. Martirosyan, Daniele Malitesta, Hugues Talbot, Jhony H. Giraldo, Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Spectral graph neural networks learn graph filters, but their behavior with increasing depth and polynomial order is not well understood. We analyze these models in the graph Fourier domain, where each layer becomes an element-wise frequency update, separating the fixed spectrum from trainable parameters and making depth and order explicit. In this setting, we show that Gaussian complexity is invariant under the Graph Fourier Transform, which allows us to derive data-dependent, depth, and order-aware generalization bounds together with stability estimates. In the linear case, our bounds are tighter, and on real graphs, the data-dependent term correlates with the generalization gap across polynomial bases, highlighting practical choices that avoid frequency amplification across layers.

comment: Accepted to AISTATS 2026

☆ Investigating Autonomous Agent Contributions in the Wild: Activity Patterns and Code Change over Time

Razvan Mihai Popescu, David Gros, Andrei Botocan, Rahul Pandita, Prem Devanbu, Maliheh Izadi

The rise of large language models for code has reshaped software development. Autonomous coding agents, able to create branches, open pull requests, and perform code reviews, now actively contribute to real-world projects. Their growing role offers a unique and timely opportunity to investigate AI-driven contributions and their effects on code quality, team dynamics, and software maintainability. In this work, we construct a novel dataset of approximately $110,000$ open-source pull requests, including associated commits, comments, reviews, issues, and file changes, collectively representing millions of lines of source code. We compare five popular coding agents, including OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Google Jules, and Devin, examining how their usage differs in various development aspects such as merge frequency, edited file types, and developer interaction signals, including comments and reviews. Furthermore, we emphasize that code authoring and review are only a small part of the larger software engineering process, as the resulting code must also be maintained and updated over time. Hence, we offer several longitudinal estimates of survival and churn rates for agent-generated versus human-authored code. Ultimately, our findings indicate an increasing agent activity in open-source projects, although their contributions are associated with more churn over time compared to human-authored code.

comment: MSR 2026 Technical Track

☆ Orthogonal Learner for Estimating Heterogeneous Long-Term Treatment Effects

Haorui Ma, Dennis Frauen, Valentyn Melnychuk, Stefan Feuerriegel

Estimation of heterogeneous long-term treatment effects (HLTEs) is widely used for personalized decision-making in marketing, economics, and medicine, where short-term randomized experiments are often combined with long-term observational data. However, HLTE estimation is challenging due to limited overlap in treatment or in observing long-term outcomes for certain subpopulations, which can lead to unstable HLTE estimates with large finite-sample variance. To address this challenge, we introduce the LT-O-learners (Long-Term Orthogonal Learners), a set of novel orthogonal learners for HLTE estimation. The learners are designed for the canonical HLTE setting that combines a short-term randomized dataset $\mathcal{D}_1$ with a long-term historical dataset $\mathcal{D}_2$. The key idea of our LT-O-Learners is to retarget the learning objective by introducing custom overlap weights that downweight samples with low overlap in treatment or in long-term observation. We show that the retargeted loss is equivalent to the weighted oracle loss and satisfies Neyman-orthogonality, which means our learners are robust to errors in the nuisance estimation. We further provide a general error bound for the LT-O-Learners and give the conditions under which quasi-oracle rate can be achieved. Finally, our LT-O-learners are model-agnostic and can thus be instantiated with arbitrary machine learning models. We conduct empirical evaluations on synthetic and semi-synthetic benchmarks to confirm the theoretical properties of our LT-O-Learners, especially the robustness in low-overlap settings. To the best of our knowledge, ours are the first orthogonal learners for HLTE estimation that are robust to low overlap that is common in long-term outcomes.

☆ Event Embedding of Protein Networks : Compositional Learning of Biological Function ICLR 2026

Antonin Sulc

In this work, we study whether enforcing strict compositional structure in sequence embeddings yields meaningful geometric organization when applied to protein-protein interaction networks. Using Event2Vec, an additive sequence embedding model, we train 64-dimensional representations on random walks from the human STRING interactome, and compare against a DeepWalk baseline based on Word2Vec, trained on the same walks. We find that compositional structure substantially improves pathway coherence (30.2$\times$ vs 2.9$\times$ above random), functional analogy accuracy (mean similarity 0.966 vs 0.650), and hierarchical pathway organization, while geometric properties such as norm--degree anticorrelation are shared with or exceeded by the non-compositional baseline. These results indicate that enforced compositionality specifically benefits relational and compositional reasoning tasks in biological networks.

comment: Machine Learning for Genomics Explorations (MLGenX) ICLR 2026 Workshop

☆ Fatigue-Aware Learning to Defer via Constrained Optimisation

Zheng Zhang, Cuong C. Nguyen, David Rosewarne, Kevin Wells, Gustavo Carneiro

Learning to defer (L2D) enables human-AI cooperation by deciding when an AI system should act autonomously or defer to a human expert. Existing L2D methods, however, assume static human performance, contradicting well-established findings on fatigue-induced degradation. We propose Fatigue-Aware Learning to Defer via Constrained Optimisation (FALCON), which explicitly models workload-varying human performance using psychologically grounded fatigue curves. FALCON formulates L2D as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) whose state includes both task features and cumulative human workload, and optimises accuracy under human-AI cooperation budgets via PPO-Lagrangian training. We further introduce FA-L2D, a benchmark that systematically varies fatigue dynamics from near-static to rapidly degrading regimes. Experiments across multiple datasets show that FALCON consistently outperforms state-of-the-art L2D methods across coverage levels, generalises zero-shot to unseen experts with different fatigue patterns, and demonstrates the advantage of adaptive human-AI collaboration over AI-only or human-only decision-making when coverage lies strictly between 0 and 1.

☆ Super-Resolving Coarse-Resolution Weather Forecasts With Flow Matching

Aymeric Delefosse, Anastase Charantonis, Dominique Béréziat

Machine learning-based weather forecasting models now surpass state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction systems, but training and operating these models at high spatial resolution remains computationally expensive. We present a modular framework that decouples forecasting from spatial resolution by applying learned generative super-resolution as a post-processing step to coarse-resolution forecast trajectories. We formulate super-resolution as a stochastic inverse problem, using a residual formulation to preserve large-scale structure while reconstructing unresolved variability. The model is trained with flow matching exclusively on reanalysis data and is applied to global medium-range forecasts. We evaluate (i) design consistency by re-coarsening super-resolved forecasts and comparing them to the original coarse trajectories, and (ii) high-resolution forecast quality using standard ensemble verification metrics and spectral diagnostics. Results show that super-resolution preserves large-scale structure and variance after re-coarsening, introduces physically consistent small-scale variability, and achieves competitive probabilistic forecast skill at 0.25° resolution relative to an operational ensemble baseline, while requiring only a modest additional training cost compared with end-to-end high-resolution forecasting.

comment: Accepted to Climate Informatics 2026

☆ KUET at StanceNakba Shared Task: StanceMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Architecture for Stance Detection

Abdullah Al Shafi, Md. Milon Islam, Sk. Imran Hossain, K. M. Azharul Hasan

Actor-level stance detection aims to determine an author expressed position toward specific geopolitical actors mentioned or implicated in a text. Although transformer-based models have achieved relatively good performance in stance classification, they typically rely on unified representations that may not sufficiently capture heterogeneous linguistic signals, such as contrastive discourse structures, framing cues, and salient lexical indicators. This motivates the need for adaptive architectures that explicitly model diverse stance-expressive patterns. In this paper, we propose StanceMoE, a context-enhanced Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture built upon a fine-tuned BERT encoder for actor-level stance detection. Our model integrates six expert modules designed to capture complementary linguistic signals, including global semantic orientation, salient lexical cues, clause-level focus, phrase-level patterns, framing indicators, and contrast-driven discourse shifts. A context-aware gating mechanism dynamically weights expert contributions, enabling adaptive routing based on input characteristics. Experiments are conducted on the StanceNakba 2026 Subtask A dataset, comprising 1,401 annotated English texts where the target actor is implicit in the text. StanceMoE achieves a macro-F1 score of 94.26%, outperforming traditional baselines, and alternative BERT-based variants.

comment: Accepted for workshop proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'26)

☆ Accurate and Scalable Matrix Mechanisms via Divide and Conquer

Guanlin He, Yingtai Xiao, Jiamu Bai, Xin Gu, Zeyu Ding, Wenpeng Yin, Daniel Kifer

Matrix mechanisms are often used to provide unbiased differentially private query answers when publishing statistics or creating synthetic data. Recent work has developed matrix mechanisms, such as ResidualPlanner and Weighted Fourier Factorizations, that scale to high dimensional datasets while providing optimality guarantees for workloads such as marginals and circular product queries. They operate by adding noise to a linearly independent set of queries that can compactly represent the desired workloads. In this paper, we present QuerySmasher, an alternative scalable approach based on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Given a workload that can be answered from various data marginals, QuerySmasher splits each query into sub-queries and re-assembles the pieces into mutually orthogonal sub-workloads. These sub-workloads represent small, low-dimensional problems that can be independently and optimally answered by existing low-dimensional matrix mechanisms. QuerySmasher then stitches these solutions together to answer queries in the original workload. We show that QuerySmasher subsumes prior work, like ResidualPlanner (RP), ResidualPlanner+ (RP+), and Weighted Fourier Factorizations (WFF). We prove that it can dominate those approaches, under sum squared error, for all workloads. We also experimentally demonstrate the scalability and accuracy of QuerySmasher.

comment: 17 pages

☆ Policy Improvement Reinforcement Learning

Huaiyang Wang, Xiaojie Li, Deqing Wang, Haoyi Zhou, Zixuan Huang, Yaodong Yang, Jianxin Li, Yikun Ban

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Yet existing methods share a common blind spot: they optimize policies based on instantaneous group-level or batch-level statistics without ever verifying whether the resulting update actually improved the model. This open-loop design -- updating in isolation at each step, guided only by within-group (batch) reward signals -- means optimization can drift or collapse with no mechanism to detect and correct these failures. We argue that the missing ingredient is policy improvement feedback: the ability to measure and optimize inter-iteration progress directly. To this end, we introduce Policy Improvement Reinforcement Learning (PIRL), a framework that replaces surrogate reward maximization with the explicit objective of maximizing cumulative policy improvement across iterations, and prove this temporal objective is perfectly aligned with maximizing final task performance. Building on PIRL, we propose Policy Improvement Policy Optimization (PIPO), which implements closed-loop optimization through retrospective verification. At each iteration, PIPO evaluates whether the previous update yielded genuine improvement against a sliding-window historical baseline, then actively reinforces beneficial updates and suppresses the harmful ones -- transforming an open-loop process into a self-correcting one. We provide theoretical analysis showing that PIPO performs ascent on the PIRL objective in expectation, and experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate improved stability and performance over GRPO and its variants.

☆ Proactive Agent Research Environment: Simulating Active Users to Evaluate Proactive Assistants

Deepak Nathani, Cheng Zhang, Chang Huan, Jiaming Shan, Yinfei Yang, Alkesh Patel, Zhe Gan, William Yang Wang, Michael Saxon, Xin Eric Wang

Proactive agents that anticipate user needs and autonomously execute tasks hold great promise as digital assistants, yet the lack of realistic user simulation frameworks hinders their development. Existing approaches model apps as flat tool-calling APIs, failing to capture the stateful and sequential nature of user interaction in digital environments and making realistic user simulation infeasible. We introduce Proactive Agent Research Environment (Pare), a framework for building and evaluating proactive agents in digital environments. Pare models applications as finite state machines with stateful navigation and state-dependent action space for the user simulator, enabling active user simulation. Building on this foundation, we present Pare-Bench, a benchmark of 143 diverse tasks spanning communication, productivity, scheduling, and lifestyle apps, designed to test context observation, goal inference, intervention timing, and multi-app orchestration.

comment: 34 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables

☆ Learning to Learn-at-Test-Time: Language Agents with Learnable Adaptation Policies

Zhanzhi Lou, Hui Chen, Yibo Li, Qian Wang, Bryan Hooi

Test-Time Learning (TTL) enables language agents to iteratively refine their performance through repeated interactions with the environment at inference time. At the core of TTL is an adaptation policy that updates the actor policy based on experience from previous episodes, thereby improving future behavior. Existing methods rely on fixed, hand-crafted adaptation policies rather than optimizing them for downstream improvement. We argue that optimal adaptation policies should be learned from task environments, not hand-engineered based on human intuition. To achieve this, we introduce Meta-TTL, a framework that formulates the discovery of effective adaptation policies as a bi-level optimization problem. Within this framework, the inner loop executes the standard TTL process, measuring how effectively a candidate adaptation policy helps an agent correct errors across sequential episodes. Guided by the agent's performance, the outer loop employs evolutionary search over a diverse distribution of training tasks to iteratively refine the adaptation policy. We evaluate Meta-TTL on Jericho and WebArena-Lite across both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, using multiple meta-agent backbones. Results on both benchmarks show that Meta-TTL consistently outperforms hand-crafted baselines, suggesting that the optimized adaptation policy encodes transferable strategies that generalize beyond the training task distribution.

☆ Optimal Brain Decomposition for Accurate LLM Low-Rank Approximation

Yuhang Li, Donghyun Lee, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda

Low-rank decomposition has emerged as an important problem in Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning and inference. Through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), the weight matrix can be factorized into low-rank spaces optimally. Previously, a common practice was to decompose the weight in the activation-whitened space, and then achieve satisfying results. In this work, we propose Optimal Brain Decomposition LLM (OBD-LLM), which studies the decomposition problem in the model space by utilizing second-order Hessian information. Through a rigorous Kronecker-factorization of the Hessian, we show that the decomposition needs to consider both input and output information of the layer, and achieves much better decomposition results compared to input only method. Our loss-aware decomposition method involves a bi-directional whitening on the weight matrix. As a result, OBD-LLM is a closed-form solution for the optimal decomposition of weights in the language model. Remarkably, we achieve ~20-40\% better results than previous state-of-the-art decomposition methods, the SVD-LLM.

☆ Cost-Penalized Fitness in FMA-Orchestrated Mixture of Experts: Experimental Evidence for Molecular Memory in Domain Adaptation

Martin Jaraiz

We present experimental results from seven controlled runs of nanoFMT, a Free-Market Algorithm (FMA) orchestrated transformer with dynamic Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) management. The experiments address a fundamental question for advanced LLM development: how should an MoE system manage its expert pool when operating at full capacity under changing data distributions? We demonstrate that cost-penalized fitness metrics, combined with a linear grace period for newborn experts, produce a system that accumulates domain expertise through diversification rather than replacement. The central result is a round-trip domain shift experiment showing 9-11x faster recovery when returning to a previously learned domain, with zero expert births or replacements required. This "molecular memory" effect -- where dormant experts survive and reactivate when their domain returns -- has no analogue in current MoE management approaches. A preliminary cost analysis estimates annual savings of $39.1M and 27.1 GWh energy reduction for an OpenAI-scale provider under a moderate scenario.

comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, draft

☆ Deconfounding Scores and Representation Learning for Causal Effect Estimation with Weak Overlap

Oscar Clivio, Alexander D'Amour, Alexander Franks, David Bruns-Smith, Chris Holmes, Avi Feller

Overlap, also known as positivity, is a key condition for causal treatment effect estimation. Many popular estimators suffer from high variance and become brittle when features differ strongly across treatment groups. This is especially challenging in high dimensions: the curse of dimensionality can make overlap implausible. To address this, we propose a class of feature representations called deconfounding scores, which preserve both identification and the target of estimation; the classical propensity and prognostic scores are two special cases. We characterize the problem of finding a representation with better overlap as minimizing an overlap divergence under a deconfounding score constraint. We then derive closed-form expressions for a class of deconfounding scores under a broad family of generalized linear models with Gaussian features and show that prognostic scores are overlap-optimal within this class. We conduct extensive experiments to assess this behavior empirically.

comment: To appear at AISTATS 2026

☆ Routing-Free Mixture-of-Experts

Yilun Liu, Jinru Han, Sikuan Yan, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma

Standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on centralized routing mechanisms that introduce rigid inductive biases. We propose Routing-Free MoE which eliminates any hard-coded centralized designs including external routers, Softmax, Top-K and load balancing, instead encapsulating all activation functionalities within individual experts and directly optimized through continuous gradient flow, enabling each expert to determine its activation entirely on its own. We introduce a unified adaptive load-balancing framework to simultaneously optimize both expert-balancing and token-balancing objectives through a configurable interpolation, allowing flexible and customizable resource allocation. Extensive experiments show that Routing-Free MoE can consistently outperform baselines with better scalability and robustness. We analyze its behavior in detail and offer insights that may facilitate future MoE design ad optimization.

comment: Code is available at https://github.com/liuyilun2000/RoutingFreeMoE/tree/release

☆ MIRANDA: MId-feature RANk-adversarial Domain Adaptation toward climate change-robust ecological forecasting with deep learning CVPR

Yuchang Jiang, Jan Dirk Wegner, Vivien Sainte Fare Garnot

Plant phenology modelling aims to predict the timing of seasonal phases, such as leaf-out or flowering, from meteorological time series. Reliable predictions are crucial for anticipating ecosystem responses to climate change. While phenology modelling has traditionally relied on mechanistic approaches, deep learning methods have recently been proposed as flexible, data-driven alternatives with often superior performance. However, mechanistic models tend to outperform deep networks when data distribution shifts are induced by climate change. Domain Adaptation (DA) techniques could help address this limitation. Yet, unlike standard DA settings, climate change induces a temporal continuum of domains and involves both a covariate and label shift, with warmer records and earlier start of spring. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Mid-feature Rank-adversarial Domain Adaptation (MIRANDA). Whereas conventional adversarial methods enforce domain invariance on final latent representations, an approach that does not explicitly address label shift, we apply adversarial regularization to intermediate features. Moreover, instead of a binary domain-classification objective, we employ a rank-based objective that enforces year-invariance in the learned meteorological representations. On a country-scale dataset spanning 70 years and comprising 67,800 phenological observations of 5 tree species, we demonstrate that, unlike conventional DA approaches, MIRANDA improves robustness to climatic distribution shifts and narrows the performance gap with mechanistic models.

comment: EarthVision CVPRW 2026

☆ Multimodal Language Models Cannot Spot Spatial Inconsistencies

Om Khangaonkar, Hadi J. Rad, Hamed Pirsiavash

Spatial consistency is a fundamental property of the visual world and a key requirement for models that aim to understand physical reality. Despite recent advances, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to reason about 3D geometry across multiple views. Rather than asking models to describe scene attributes, we introduce a more challenging task: given two views of the same scene, identify the object that violates 3D motion consistency. We propose a simple and scalable method for generating realistic, spatially inconsistent image pairs from multi-view scenes, enabling systematic evaluation of this capability. Our results show that state-of-the-art MLLMs significantly underperform human observers and exhibit substantial variability across different scene attributes, revealing a fragile and incomplete understanding of 3D structure. We hope our findings underscore the need for approaches that develop a more deeply grounded understanding of the physical world.

☆ Preference Guided Iterated Pareto Referent Optimisation for Accessible Route Planning

Paolo Speziali, Arno De Greef, Mehrdad Asadi, Willem Röpke, Ann Nowé, Diederik M. Roijers

We propose the Preference Guided Iterated Pareto Referent Optimisation (PG-IPRO) for urban route planning for people with different accessibility requirements and preferences. With this algorithm the user can interact with the system by giving feedback on a route, i.e., the user can say which objective should be further minimized, or conversely can be relaxed. This leads to intuitive user interaction, that is especially effective during early iterations compared to information-gain-based interaction. Furthermore, due to PG-IPRO's iterative nature, the full set of alternative, possibly optimal policies (the Pareto front), is never computed, leading to higher computational efficiency and shorter waiting times for users.

☆ Scalable Pretraining of Large Mixture of Experts Language Models on Aurora Super Computer

Dharma Teja Vooturi, Dhiraj Kalamkar, Dipankar Das, Bharat Kaul

Pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch requires massive amount of compute. Aurora super computer is an ExaScale machine with 127,488 Intel PVC (Ponte Vechio) GPU tiles. In this work, we showcase LLM pretraining on Aurora at the scale of 1000s of GPU tiles. Towards this effort, we developed Optimus, an inhouse training library with support for standard large model training techniques. Using Optimus, we first pretrained Mula-1B, a 1 Billion dense model and Mula-7B-A1B, a 7 Billion Mixture of Experts (MoE) model from scratch on 3072 GPU tiles for the full 4 trillion tokens of the OLMoE-mix-0924 dataset. We then demonstrated model scaling by pretraining three large MoE models Mula-20B-A2B, Mula-100B-A7B, and Mula-220B-A10B till 100 Billion tokens on the same dataset. On our largest model Mula-220B-A10B, we pushed the compute scaling from 384 to 12288 GPU tiles and observed scaling efficiency of around 90% at 12288 GPU tiles. We significantly improved the runtime performance of MoE models using custom GPU kernels for expert computation, and a novel EP-Aware sharded optimizer resulting in training speedups up to 1.71x. As part of the Optimus library, we also developed a robust set of reliability and fault tolerant features to improve training stability and continuity at scale.

☆ Using predefined vector systems to speed up neural network multimillion class classification

Nikita Gabdullin, Ilya Androsov

Label prediction in neural networks (NNs) has O(n) complexity proportional to the number of classes. This holds true for classification using fully connected layers and cosine similarity with some set of class prototypes. In this paper we show that if NN latent space (LS) geometry is known and possesses specific properties, label prediction complexity can be significantly reduced. This is achieved by associating label prediction with the O(1) complexity closest cluster center search in a vector system used as target for latent space configuration (LSC). The proposed method only requires finding indexes of several largest and lowest values in the embedding vector making it extremely computationally efficient. We show that the proposed method does not change NN training accuracy computational results. We also measure the time required by different computational stages of NN inference and label prediction on multiple datasets. The experiments show that the proposed method allows to achieve up to 11.6 times overall acceleration over conventional methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has unique properties which allow to predict the existence of new classes.

comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, 2 algorithms, 1 theorem, 1 lemma

☆ Thinking Wrong in Silence: Backdoor Attacks on Continuous Latent Reasoning

Swapnil Parekh

A new generation of language models reasons entirely in continuous hidden states, producing no tokens and leaving no audit trail. We show that this silence creates a fundamentally new attack surface. ThoughtSteer perturbs a single embedding vector at the input layer; the model's own multi-pass reasoning amplifies this perturbation into a hijacked latent trajectory that reliably produces the attacker's chosen answer, while remaining structurally invisible to every token-level defense. Across two architectures (Coconut and SimCoT), three reasoning benchmarks, and model scales from 124M to 3B parameters, ThoughtSteer achieves >=99% attack success rate with near-baseline clean accuracy, transfers to held-out benchmarks without retraining (94-100%), evades all five evaluated active defenses, and survives 25 epochs of clean fine-tuning. We trace these results to a unifying mechanism: Neural Collapse in the latent space pulls triggered representations onto a tight geometric attractor, explaining both why defenses fail and why any effective backdoor must leave a linearly separable signature (probe AUC>=0.999). Yet a striking paradox emerges: individual latent vectors still encode the correct answer even as the model outputs the wrong one. The adversarial information is not in any single vector but in the collective trajectory, establishing backdoor perturbations as a new lens for mechanistic interpretability of continuous reasoning. Code and checkpoints are available.

☆ ActivityNarrated: An Open-Ended Narrative Paradigm for Wearable Human Activity Understanding

Lala Shakti Swarup Ray, Mengxi Liu, Alcina Pinto, Deepika Gurung, Daniel Geissler, Paul Lukowoicz, Bo Zhou

Wearable HAR has improved steadily, but most progress still relies on closed-set classification, which limits real-world use. In practice, human activity is open-ended, unscripted, personalized, and often compositional, unfolding as narratives rather than instances of fixed classes. We argue that addressing this gap does not require simply scaling datasets or models. It requires a fundamental shift in how wearable HAR is formulated, supervised, and evaluated. This work shows how to model open-ended activity narratives by aligning wearable sensor data with natural-language descriptions in an open-vocabulary setting. Our framework has three core components. First, we introduce a naturalistic data collection and annotation pipeline that combines multi-position wearable sensing with free-form, time-aligned narrative descriptions of ongoing behavior, allowing activity semantics to emerge without a predefined vocabulary. Second, we define a retrieval-based evaluation framework that measures semantic alignment between sensor data and language, enabling principled evaluation without fixed classes while also subsuming closed-set classification as a special case. Third, we present a language-conditioned learning architecture that supports sensor-to-text inference over variable-length sensor streams and heterogeneous sensor placements. Experiments show that models trained with fixed-label objectives degrade sharply under real-world variability, while open-vocabulary sensor-language alignment yields robust and semantically grounded representations. Once this alignment is learned, closed-set activity recognition becomes a simple downstream task. Under cross-participant evaluation, our method achieves 65.3% Macro-F1, compared with 31-34% for strong closed-set HAR baselines. These results establish open-ended narrative modeling as a practical and effective foundation for real-world wearable HAR.

☆ Stochastic Attention: Connectome-Inspired Randomized Routing for Expressive Linear-Time Attention

Zehao Jin, Yanan Sui

The whole-brain connectome of a fruit fly comprises over 130K neurons connected with a probability of merely 0.02%, yet achieves an average shortest path of only 4.4 hops. Despite being highly structured at the circuit level, the network's long-range connections are broadly distributed across brain regions, functioning as stochastic shortcuts that enable efficient global communication. Inspired by this observation, we propose Stochastic Attention (SA), a drop-in enhancement for sliding-window attention (SWA) that applies a random permutation to the token sequence before windowed attention and restores the original order afterward. This transforms the fixed local window into a stochastic global one within the same $O(nw)$ per-layer budget. Through depth, independently sampled permutations yield exponentially growing receptive fields, achieving full sequence coverage in $O(\log_w n)$ layers versus $O(n/w)$ for SWA. We validate SA in two settings: pre-training language models from scratch, where a gated SA + SWA combination achieves the best average zero-shot accuracy, and training-free inference on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B-A3B, where SA consistently outperforms SWA and matches or exceeds Mixture of Block Attention at comparable compute budgets. These results suggest that connectome-inspired stochastic routing is a practical primitive for improving the expressivity of efficient attention, complementary to existing linear and sparse approaches.

☆ BioCOMPASS: Integrating Biomarkers into Transformer-Based Immunotherapy Response Prediction

Sayed Hashim, Frank Soboczenski, Paul Cairns

Datasets used in immunotherapy response prediction are typically small in size, as well as diverse in cancer type, drug administered, and sequencer used. Models often drop in performance when tested on patient cohorts that are not included in the training process. Recent work has shown that transformer-based models along with self-supervised learning show better generalisation performance than threshold-based biomarkers, but is still suboptimal. We present BioCOMPASS, an extension of a transformer-based model called COMPASS, that integrates biomarkers and treatment information to further improve its generalisability. Instead of feeding biomarker data as input, we built loss components to align them with the model's intermediate representations. We found that components such as treatment gating and pathway consistency loss improved generalisability when evaluated with Leave-one-cohort-out, Leave-one-cancer-type-out and Leave-one-treatment-out strategies. Results show that building components that exploit biomarker and treatment information can help in generalisability of immunotherapy response prediction. Careful curation of additional components that leverage complementary clinical information and domain knowledge represents a promising direction for future research.

☆ Spectral Compact Training: Pre-Training Large Language Models via Permanent Truncated SVD and Stiefel QR Retraction

Björn Roman Kohlberger

The memory wall remains the primary bottleneck for training large language models on consumer hardware. We introduce Spectral Compact Training (SCT), a method that replaces dense weight matrices with permanent truncated SVD factors W = U diag(s) V^T, where the full dense matrix is never materialized during training or inference. Gradients flow through the compact spectral factors via standard backpropagation, and U, V are retracted to the Stiefel manifold via QR decomposition after each optimizer step. SCT achieves up to 199x memory reduction per MLP layer at rank 32, enabling full training steps of 70B-parameter architectures on a Steam Deck handheld (7.2 GB peak memory vs. 1,245 GB for dense FP32 training with Adam). Rank-sweep experiments on SmolLM2-1.7B (ranks 32-256, 2000 steps, NVIDIA A100) show that all tested ranks converge to the same loss floor (~4.2-4.5), identifying the learning rate schedule -- not MLP rank -- as the primary bottleneck. Rank 128 emerges as the efficiency sweet spot at 11.7x MLP compression with the lowest perplexity. GPU memory drops 46% at rank 32 while training throughput doubles.

comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables. Patent pending: Irish Application PTIE20260000000219. Code at https://github.com/EctoSpace/SCT

☆ A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

Ricardo Hidalgo-Aragón, Jesús M. González-Barahona, Gregorio Robles

Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation--while providing certainty--based triggers for human intervention.

comment: Paper accepted at CSEDU 2026

☆ Exploring Silent Data Corruption as a Reliability Challenge in LLM Training

Anton Altenbernd, Philipp Wiesner, Odej Kao

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale in size and complexity, the consequences of failures during training become increasingly severe. A major challenge arises from Silent Data Corruption (SDC): hardware-induced faults that bypass system-level detection mechanisms. SDC may behave like benign numerical noise, but can also cause harmful gradient corruption that leads to loss spikes, divergence, or stalled progress. This work provides a controlled study of how intermittent SDC affects LLM pretraining. Using targeted fault injection at the level of GPU matrix-multiply instructions, we characterize the sensitivity of different bit positions, kernel functions, and execution stages. Our analysis shows that locally originating faults can produce impactful corruption, including NaN propagation, short-lived spikes in loss, gradient norm, and attention logits, as well as persistent parameter divergence. Building on the observed corruption signatures, we propose a lightweight detection method that identifies potentially harmful parameter updates. Experiments on LLaMA models with 60M, 350M, and 1.3B parameters demonstrate that recomputing the most recent training step upon detection can effectively mitigate the impact of these events.

comment: 10 Pages, 4 Figures, CCGrid 2026

☆ A Benchmark of State-Space Models vs. Transformers and BiLSTM-based Models for Historical Newspaper OCR

Merveilles Agbeti-messan, Thierry Paquet, Clément Chatelain, Pierrick Tranouez, Stéphane Nicolas

End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts. While Transformer-based recognizers dominate current research, their quadratic complexity limits efficient paragraph-level transcription and large-scale deployment. We investigate linear-time State-Space Models (SSMs), specifically Mamba, as a scalable alternative to Transformer-based sequence modeling for OCR. We present to our knowledge, the first OCR architecture based on SSMs, combining a CNN visual encoder with bi-directional and autoregressive Mamba sequence modeling, and conduct a large-scale benchmark comparing SSMs with Transformer- and BiLSTM-based recognizers. Multiple decoding strategies (CTC, autoregressive, and non-autoregressive) are evaluated under identical training conditions alongside strong neural baselines (VAN, DAN, DANIEL) and widely used off-the-shelf OCR engines (PERO-OCR, Tesseract OCR, TrOCR, Gemini). Experiments on historical newspapers from the Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, with newly released >99% verified gold-standard annotations, and cross-dataset tests on Fraktur and Antiqua lines, show that all neural models achieve low error rates (~2% CER), making computational efficiency the main differentiator. Mamba-based models maintain competitive accuracy while halving inference time and exhibiting superior memory scaling (1.26x vs 2.30x growth at 1000 chars), reaching 6.07% CER at the severely degraded paragraph level compared to 5.24% for DAN, while remaining 2.05x faster. We release code, trained models, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable reproducible research and guide practitioners in large-scale cultural heritage OCR.

☆ CircuitProbe: Predicting Reasoning Circuits in Transformers via Stability Zone Detection

Rajkiran Panuganti

Transformer language models contain localized reasoning circuits, contiguous layer blocks that improve reasoning when duplicated at inference time. Finding these circuits currently requires brute-force sweeps costing 25 GPU hours per model. We propose CircuitProbe, which predicts circuit locations from activation statistics in under 5 minutes on CPU, providing a speedup of three to four orders of magnitude. We find that reasoning circuits come in two types: stability circuits in early layers, detected through the derivative of representation change, and magnitude circuits in late layers, detected through anomaly scoring. We validate across 9 models spanning 6 architectures, including 2025 models, confirming that CircuitProbe top predictions match or are within 2 layers of the optimal circuit in all validated cases. A scaling experiment across the Qwen 2.5 family reveals that layer duplication consistently benefits models under 3B parameters but degrades performance in 7B+ models, making this a practical scaling technique for small language models. CircuitProbe requires as few as 10 calibration examples and its predictions are stable across English, Hindi, Chinese, and French.

comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables. Code available at https://github.com/agenticclass/circuitprobe

☆ To Memorize or to Retrieve: Scaling Laws for RAG-Considerate Pretraining

Karan Singh, Michael Yu, Varun Gangal, Zhuofu Tao, Sachin Kumar, Emmy Liu, Steven Y. Feng

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves language model (LM) performance by providing relevant context at test time for knowledge-intensive situations. However, the relationship between parametric knowledge acquired during pretraining and non-parametric knowledge accessed via retrieval remains poorly understood, especially under fixed data budgets. In this work, we systematically study the trade-off between pretraining corpus size and retrieval store size across a wide range of model and data scales. We train OLMo-2-based LMs ranging from 30M to 3B parameters on up to 100B tokens of DCLM data, while varying both pretraining data scale (1-150x the number of parameters) and retrieval store size (1-20x), and evaluate performance across a diverse suite of benchmarks spanning reasoning, scientific QA, and open-domain QA. We find that retrieval consistently improves performance over parametric-only baselines across model scales and introduce a three-dimensional scaling framework that models performance as a function of model size, pretraining tokens, and retrieval corpus size. This scaling manifold enables us to estimate optimal allocations of a fixed data budget between pretraining and retrieval, revealing that the marginal utility of retrieval depends strongly on model scale, task type, and the degree of pretraining saturation. Our results provide a quantitative foundation for understanding when and how retrieval should complement pretraining, offering practical guidance for allocating data resources in the design of scalable language modeling systems.

comment: Code and data at https://github.com/DegenAI-Labs/RAG-scaling-laws

☆ Learning to Hint for Reinforcement Learning

Yu Xia, Canwen Xu, Zhewei Yao, Julian McAuley, Yuxiong He

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, but it often suffers from advantage collapse: when all rollouts in a group receive the same reward, the group yields zero relative advantage and thus no learning signal. For example, if a question is too hard for the reasoner, all sampled rollouts can be incorrect and receive zero reward. Recent work addresses this issue by adding hints or auxiliary scaffolds to such hard questions so that the reasoner produces mixed outcomes and recovers a non-zero update. However, existing hints are usually fixed rather than adapted to the current reasoner, and a hint that creates learning signal under the hinted input does not necessarily improve the no-hint policy used at test time. To this end, we propose Hint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (HiLL), a framework that jointly trains a hinter policy and a reasoner policy during RL. For each hard question, the hinter generates hints online conditioned on the current reasoner's incorrect rollout, allowing hint generation to adapt to the reasoner's evolving errors. We further introduce hint reliance, which measures how strongly correct hinted trajectories depend on the hint. We derive a transferability result showing that lower hint reliance implies stronger transfer from hinted success to no-hint success, and we use this result to define a transfer-weighted reward for training the hinter. Therefore, HiLL favors hints that not only recover informative GRPO groups, but also produce signals that are more likely to improve the original no-hint policy. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that HiLL consistently outperforms GRPO and prior hint-based baselines, demonstrating the value of adaptive and transfer-aware hint learning for RL. The code is available at https://github.com/Andree-9/HiLL.

☆ Inverse-Free Sparse Variational Gaussian Processes

Stefano Cortinovis, Laurence Aitchison, Stefanos Eleftheriadis, Mark van der Wilk

Gaussian processes (GPs) offer appealing properties but are costly to train at scale. Sparse variational GP (SVGP) approximations reduce cost yet still rely on Cholesky decompositions of kernel matrices, ill-suited to low-precision, massively parallel hardware. While one can construct valid variational bounds that rely only on matrix multiplications (matmuls) via an auxiliary matrix parameter, optimising them with off-the-shelf first-order methods is challenging. We make the inverse-free approach practical by proposing a better-conditioned bound and deriving a matmul-only natural-gradient update for the auxiliary parameter, markedly improving stability and convergence. We further provide simple heuristics, such as step-size schedules and stopping criteria, that make the overall optimisation routine fit seamlessly into existing workflows. Across regression and classification benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method 1) serves as a drop-in replacement in SVGP-based models (e.g., deep GPs), 2) recovers similar performance to traditional methods, and 3) can be faster than baselines when well tuned.

comment: Accepted to AISTATS 2026. 20 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

☆ Performance of Neural and Polynomial Operator Surrogates

Josephine Westermann, Benno Huber, Thomas O'Leary-Roseberry, Jakob Zech

We consider the problem of constructing surrogate operators for parameter-to-solution maps arising from parametric partial differential equations, where repeated forward model evaluations are computationally expensive. We present a systematic empirical comparison of neural operator surrogates, including a reduced-basis neural operator trained with $L^2_μ$ and $H^1_μ$ objectives and the Fourier neural operator, against polynomial surrogate methods, specifically a reduced-basis sparse-grid surrogate and a reduced-basis tensor-train surrogate. All methods are evaluated on a linear parametric diffusion problem and a nonlinear parametric hyperelasticity problem, using input fields with algebraically decaying spectral coefficients at varying rates of decay $s$. To enable fair comparisons, we analyze ensembles of surrogate models generated by varying hyperparameters and compare the resulting Pareto frontiers of cost versus approximation accuracy, decomposing cost into contributions from data generation, setup, and evaluation. Our results show that no single method is universally superior. Polynomial surrogates achieve substantially better data efficiency for smooth input fields ($s \geq 2$), with convergence rates for the sparse-grid surrogate in agreement with theoretical predictions. For rough inputs ($s \leq 1$), the Fourier neural operator displays the fastest convergence rates. Derivative-informed training consistently improves data efficiency over standard $L^2_μ$ training, providing a competitive alternative for rough inputs in the low-data regime when Jacobian information is available at reasonable cost. These findings highlight the importance of matching the surrogate methodology to the regularity of the problem as well as accuracy demands and computational constraints of the application.

comment: 44 pages, 21 figures

☆ Full-Gradient Successor Feature Representations

Ritish Shrirao, Aditya Priyadarshi, Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi

Successor Features (SF) combined with Generalized Policy Improvement (GPI) provide a robust framework for transfer learning in Reinforcement Learning (RL) by decoupling environment dynamics from reward functions. However, standard SF learning methods typically rely on semi-gradient Temporal Difference (TD) updates. When combined with non-linear function approximation, semi-gradient methods lack robust convergence guarantees and can lead to instability, particularly in the multi-task setting where accurate feature estimation is critical for effective GPI. Inspired by Full Gradient DQN, we propose Full-Gradient Successor Feature Representations Q-Learning (FG-SFRQL), an algorithm that optimizes the successor features by minimizing the full Mean Squared Bellman Error. Unlike standard approaches, our method computes gradients with respect to parameters in both the online and target networks. We provide a theoretical proof of almost-sure convergence for FG-SFRQL and demonstrate empirically that minimizing the full residual leads to superior sample efficiency and transfer performance compared to semi-gradient baselines in both discrete and continuous domains.

comment: Submitted to IEEE CDC 2026

☆ Embedded Variational Neural Stochastic Differential Equations for Learning Heterogeneous Dynamics

Sandeep Kumar Samota, Reema Gupta, Snehashish Chakraverty

This study examines the challenges of modeling complex and noisy data related to socioeconomic factors over time, with a focus on data from various districts in Odisha, India. Traditional time-series models struggle to capture both trends and variations together in this type of data. To tackle this, a Variational Neural Stochastic Differential Equation (V-NSDE) model is designed that combines the expressive dynamics of Neural SDEs with the generative capabilities of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). This model uses an encoder and a decoder. The encoder takes the initial observations and district embeddings and translates them into a Gaussian distribution, which determines the mean and log-variance of the first latent state. Then the obtained latent state initiates the Neural SDE, which utilize neural networks to determine the drift and diffusion functions that govern continuous-time latent dynamics. These governing functions depend on the time index, latent state, and district embedding, which help the model learn the unique characteristics specific to each district. After that, using a probabilistic decoder, the observations are reconstructed from the latent trajectory. The decoder outputs a mean and log-variance for each time step, which follows the Gaussian likelihood. The Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) training loss improves by adding a KL-divergence regularization term to the negative log-likelihood (nll). The obtained results demonstrate the effective learning of V-NSDE in recognizing complex patterns over time, yielding realistic outcomes that include clear trends and random fluctuations across different areas.

☆ Chameleons do not Forget: Prompt-Based Online Continual Learning for Next Activity Prediction

Marwan Hassani, Tamara Verbeek, Sjoerd van Straten

Predictive process monitoring (PPM) focuses on predicting future process trajectories, including next activity predictions. This is crucial in dynamic environments where processes change or face uncertainty. However, current frameworks often assume a static environment, overlooking dynamic characteristics and concept drifts. This results in catastrophic forgetting, where training while focusing merely on new data distribution negatively impacts the performance on previously learned data distributions. Continual learning addresses, among others, the challenges related to mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This paper proposes a novel approach called Continual Next Activity Prediction with Prompts (CNAPwP), which adapts the DualPrompt algorithm for next activity prediction to improve accuracy and adaptability while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. We introduce new datasets with recurring concept drifts, alongside a task-specific forgetting metric that measures the prediction accuracy gap between initial occurrence and subsequent task occurrences. Extensive testing on three synthetic and two real-world datasets representing several setups of recurrent drifts shows that CNAPwP achieves SOTA or competitive results compared to five baselines, demonstrating its potential applicability in real-world scenarios. An open-source implementation of our method, together with the datasets and results, is available at: https://github.com/SvStraten/CNAPwP.

comment: This paper has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems

☆ On rankings in multiplayer games with an application to the game of Whist

Alexis Coyette, Charles Modera, Candy Sonveaux, Judicaël Mohet, Francçois-Grégoire Bierwart, Sylverio Pool Marquez, Jarod Ketcha Kouakep, Cédric Simal, Komlan Fiagbe, Violaine Piengeon, Martin Moriamé, Justine Bodart, Marie Dorchain, Maxime Lucas, Rommel Tchinda Djeudjo, Gianluca Peri, Eve Tilman

We propose a novel extension of the Bradley-Terry model to multiplayer games and adapt a recent algorithm by Newman [1] to our model. We demonstrate the use of our proposed method on synthetic datasets and on a real dataset of games of cards.

comment: Author order determined by the proposed ranking method

☆ Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Modeling Socio-Economic Dynamics

Sandeep Kumar Samota, Snehashish Chakraverty, Narayan Sethi

Poverty is a complex dynamic challenge that cannot be adequately captured using predefined differential equations. Nowadays, artificial machine learning (ML) methods have demonstrated significant potential in modelling real-world dynamical systems. Among these, Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) have emerged as a powerful, data-driven approach for learning continuous-time dynamics directly from observations. This chapter applies the Neural ODE framework to analyze poverty dynamics in the Indian state of Odisha. Specifically, we utilize time-series data from 2007 to 2020 on the key indicators of economic development and poverty reduction. Within the Neural ODE architecture, the temporal gradient of the system is represented by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The obtained neural dynamical system is integrated using a numerical ODE solver to obtain the trajectory of over time. In backpropagation, the adjoint sensitivity method is utilized for gradient computation during training to facilitate effective backpropagation through the ODE solver. The trained Neural ODE model reproduces the observed data with high accuracy. This demonstrates the capability of Neural ODE to capture the dynamics of the poverty indicator of concrete-structured households. The obtained results show that ML methods, such as Neural ODEs, can serve as effective tools for modeling socioeconomic transitions. It can provide policymakers with reliable projections, supporting more informed and effective decision-making for poverty alleviation.

☆ A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng

Knowledge distillation has become a primary mechanism for transferring reasoning and domain expertise from frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller, deployable students. However, the dominant paradigm remains \textit{off-policy}: students train on static teacher-generated data and never encounter their own errors during learning. This train--test mismatch, an instance of \textit{exposure bias}, causes prediction errors to compound autoregressively at inference time. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) addresses this by letting the student generate its own trajectories and receive teacher feedback on these self-generated outputs, grounding distillation in the theory of interactive imitation learning. Despite rapid growth spanning divergence minimization, reward-guided learning, and self-play, the OPD literature remains fragmented with no unified treatment. This survey provides the first comprehensive overview of OPD for LLMs. We introduce a unified $f$-divergence framework over on-policy samples and organize the landscape along three orthogonal dimensions: \emph{feedback signal} (logit-based, outcome-based, or self-play), \emph{teacher access} (white-box, black-box, or teacher-free), and \emph{loss granularity} (token-level, sequence-level, or hybrid). We systematically analyze representative methods, examine industrial deployments, and identify open problems including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, and agent-level distillation.

☆ Predicting Dynamics of Ultra-Large Complex Systems by Inferring Governing Equations

Qi Shao, Duxin Chen, Jiawen Chen, Yujie Zeng, Athen Ma, Wenwu Yu, Vito Latora, Wei Lin

Predicting the behavior of ultra-large complex systems, from climate to biological and technological networks, is a central unsolved challenge. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: equation discovery methods provide interpretability but fail to scale, while neural networks scale but operate as black boxes and often lose reliability over long times. Here, we introduce the Sparse Identification Graph Neural Network, a framework that overcome this divide by allowing to infer the governing equations of large networked systems from data. By defining symbolic discovery as edge-level information, SIGN decouples the scalability of sparse identification from network size, enabling efficient equation discovery even in large systems. SIGN allows to study networks with over 100,000 nodes while remaining robust to noise, sparse sampling, and missing data. Across diverse benchmark systems, including coupled chaotic oscillators, neural dynamics, and epidemic spreading, it recovers governing equations with high precision and sustains accurate long-term predictions. Applied to a data set of time series of temperature measurements in 71,987 sea surface positions, SIGN identifies a compact predictive network model and captures large-scale sea surface temperature conditions up to two years in advance. By enabling equation discovery at previously inaccessible scales, SIGN opens a path toward interpretable and reliable prediction of real-world complex systems.

comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, under review

☆ Representation choice shapes the interpretation of protein conformational dynamics

Axel Giottonini, Thomas Lemmin

Molecular dynamics simulations provide detailed trajectories at the atomic level, but extracting interpretable and robust insights from these high-dimensional data remains challenging. In practice, analyses typically rely on a single representation. Here, we show that representation choice is not neutral: it fundamentally shapes the conformational organization, similarity relationships, and apparent transitions inferred from identical simulation data. To complement existing representations, we introduce Orientation features, a geometrically grounded, rotation-aware encoding of protein backbone. We compare it against common descriptions across three dynamical regimes: fast-folding proteins, large-scale domain motions, and protein-protein association. Across these systems, we find that different representations emphasize complementary aspects of conformational space, and that no single representation provides a complete picture of the underlying dynamics. To facilitate systematic comparison, we developed ManiProt, a library for efficient computation and analysis of multiple protein representations. Our results motivate a comparative, representation-aware framework for the interpretation of molecular dynamics simulations.

☆ Multi-Camera View Scaling for Data-Efficient Robot Imitation Learning

Yichen Xie, Yixiao Wang, Shuqi Zhao, Cheng-En Wu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Jianwen Xie, Hao-Shu Fang

The generalization ability of imitation learning policies for robotic manipulation is fundamentally constrained by the diversity of expert demonstrations, while collecting demonstrations across varied environments is costly and difficult in practice. In this paper, we propose a practical framework that exploits inherent scene diversity without additional human effort by scaling camera views during demonstration collection. Instead of acquiring more trajectories, multiple synchronized camera perspectives are used to generate pseudo-demonstrations from each expert trajectory, which enriches the training distribution and improves viewpoint invariance in visual representations. We analyze how different action spaces interact with view scaling and show that camera-space representations further enhance diversity. In addition, we introduce a multiview action aggregation method that allows single-view policies to benefit from multiple cameras during deployment. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate significant gains in data efficiency and generalization compared to single-view baselines. Our results suggest that scaling camera views provides a practical and scalable solution for imitation learning, which requires minimal additional hardware setup and integrates seamlessly with existing imitation learning algorithms. The website of our project is https://yichen928.github.io/robot_multiview.

☆ HabitatAgent: An End-to-End Multi-Agent System for Housing Consultation

Hongyang Yang, Yanxin Zhang, Yang She, Yue Xiao, Hao Wu, Yiyang Zhang, Jiapeng Hou, Rongshan Zhang

Housing selection is a high-stakes and largely irreversible decision problem. We study housing consultation as a decision-support interface for housing selection. Existing housing platforms and many LLM-based assistants often reduce this process to ranking or recommendation, resulting in opaque reasoning, brittle multi-constraint handling, and limited guarantees on factuality. We present HabitatAgent, the first LLM-powered multi-agent architecture for end-to-end housing consultation. HabitatAgent comprises four specialized agent roles: Memory, Retrieval, Generation, and Validation. The Memory Agent maintains multi-layer user memory through internal stages for constraint extraction, memory fusion, and verification-gated updates; the Retrieval Agent performs hybrid vector--graph retrieval (GraphRAG); the Generation Agent produces evidence-referenced recommendations and explanations; and the Validation Agent applies multi-tier verification and targeted remediation. Together, these agents provide an auditable and reliable workflow for end-to-end housing consultation. We evaluate HabitatAgent on 100 real user consultation scenarios (300 multi-turn question--answer pairs) under an end-to-end correctness protocol. A strong single-stage baseline (Dense+Rerank) achieves 75% accuracy, while HabitatAgent reaches 95%.

comment: Accepted at the DMO-FinTech Workshop (PAKDD 2026)

☆ Scenario theory for multi-criteria data-driven decision making

Simone Garatti, Lucrezia Manieri, Alessandro Falsone, Algo Carè, Marco C. Campi, Maria Prandini

The scenario approach provides a powerful data-driven framework for designing solutions under uncertainty with rigorous probabilistic robustness guarantees. Existing theory, however, primarily addresses assessing robustness with respect to a single appropriateness criterion for the solution based on a dataset, whereas many practical applications - including multi-agent decision problems - require the simultaneous consideration of multiple criteria and the assessment of their robustness based on multiple datasets, one per criterion. This paper develops a general scenario theory for multi-criteria data-driven decision making. A central innovation lies in the collective treatment of the risks associated with violations of individual criteria, which yields substantially more accurate robustness certificates than those derived from a naive application of standard results. In turn, this approach enables a sharper quantification of the robustness level with which all criteria are simultaneously satisfied. The proposed framework applies broadly to multi-criteria data-driven decision problems, providing a principled, scalable, and theoretically grounded methodology for design under uncertainty.

☆ Does Unification Come at a Cost? Uni-SafeBench: A Safety Benchmark for Unified Multimodal Large Models

Zixiang Peng, Yongxiu Xu, Qinyi Zhang, Jiexun Shen, Yifan Zhang, Hongbo Xu, Yubin Wang, Gaopeng Gou

Unified Multimodal Large Models (UMLMs) integrate understanding and generation capabilities within a single architecture. While this architectural unification, driven by the deep fusion of multimodal features, enhances model performance, it also introduces important yet underexplored safety challenges. Existing safety benchmarks predominantly focus on isolated understanding or generation tasks, failing to evaluate the holistic safety of UMLMs when handling diverse tasks under a unified framework. To address this, we introduce Uni-SafeBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring a taxonomy of six major safety categories across seven task types. To ensure rigorous assessment, we develop Uni-Judger, a framework that effectively decouples contextual safety from intrinsic safety. Based on comprehensive evaluations across Uni-SafeBench, we uncover that while the unification process enhances model capabilities, it significantly degrades the inherent safety of the underlying LLM. Furthermore, open-source UMLMs exhibit much lower safety performance than multimodal large models specialized for either generation or understanding tasks. We open-source all resources to systematically expose these risks and foster safer AGI development.

☆ Activation Saturation and Floquet Spectrum Collapse in Neural ODEs

Nikolaos M. Matzakos

We prove that activation saturation imposes a structural dynamical limitation on autonomous Neural ODEs $\dot{h}=f_θ(h)$ with saturating activations ($\tanh$, sigmoid, etc.): if $q$ hidden layers of the MLP $f_θ$ satisfy $|σ'|\leδ$ on a region~$U$, the input Jacobian is attenuated as $\norm{Df_θ(x)}\le C(U)$ (for activations with $\sup_{x}|σ'(x)|\le 1$, e.g.\ $\tanh$ and sigmoid, this reduces to $C_Wδ^q$), forcing every Floquet (Lyapunov) exponen along any $T$-periodic orbit $γ\subset U$ into the interval $[-C(U),\;C(U)]$. This is a collapse of the Floquet spectrum: as saturation deepens ($δ\to 0$), all exponents are driven to zero, limiting both strong contraction and chaotic sensitivity. The obstruction is structural -- it constrains the learned vector field at inference time, independent of training quality. As a secondary contribution, for activations with $σ'>0$, a saturation-weighted spectral factorisation yields a refined bound $\widetilde{C}(U)\le C(U)$ whose improvement is amplified exponentially in~$T$ at the flow level. All results are numerically illustrated on the Stuart--Landau oscillator; the bounds provide a theoretical explanation for the empirically observed failure of $\tanh$-NODEs on the Morris--Lecar neuron model.

comment: 21 pages, 5 figures

☆ Learning from Many and Adapting to the Unknown in Open-set Test Streams

Xiao Zhang, Juntao Lyu, Tianyu Hu, Qianchuan Zhao, Huimin Ma

Large Language Models (LLMs) generalize across tasks via reusable representations and flexible reasoning, yet remain brittle in real deployment under evolving tasks and continual distribution shift. A common approach is Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), existing ones of which updates models with hand-designed unsupervised objectives over the full parameter space and mostly overlook preserving shared source knowledge and the reliability of adaptation signals. Drawing on molecular signaling cascades of memory updating in Drosophila, we propose Synapse Consolidation (SyCo), a parameter-efficient LLM adaptation method that updates low-rank adapters through Rac1 and MAPK pathways under the guidance of a structured TTA objective driven by problem understanding, process understanding, and source-domain guardrail. Rac1 confines plasticity to a tail-gradient subspace that is less critical for source knowledge, enabling rapid specialization while preserving source representations. MAPK uses a tiered controller to suppress noisy updates and consolidate useful adaptations under non-stationary streams. To model real deployments with multiple sources and continually emerging tasks, we introduce Multi-source Open-set Adaptation (MOA) setting, where a model is trained on multiple labeled source tasks and then adapts on open, non-stationary unlabeled test streams that mix seen and unseen tasks with partial overlap in label and intent space. Across 18 NLP datasets and the MOA setting, SyCo consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving 78.31\% on unseen-task adaptation and 85.37\% on unseen-data shifts.

☆ Learning Shared Representations for Multi-Task Linear Bandits

Jiabin Lin, Shana Moothedath

Multi-task representation learning is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating knowledge transfer and improving sample efficiency. This paper introduces a novel approach to multi-task representation learning in linear bandits. We consider a setting with T concurrent linear bandit tasks, each with feature dimension d, that share a common latent representation of dimension r \ll min{d,T}$, capturing their underlying relatedness. We propose a new Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty Linear (OFUL) algorithm that leverages shared low-rank representations to enhance decision-making in a sample-efficient manner. Our algorithm first collects data through an exploration phase, estimates the shared model via spectral initialization, and then conducts OFUL based learning over a newly constructed confidence set. We provide theoretical guarantees for the confidence set and prove that the unknown reward vectors lie within the confidence set with high probability. We derive cumulative regret bounds and show that the proposed approach achieves \tilde{O}(\sqrt{drNT}), a significant improvement over solving the T tasks independently, resulting in a regret of \tilde{O}(dT\sqrt{N}). We performed numerical simulations to validate the performance of our algorithm for different problem sizes.

♻ ☆ CRoPE: Efficient Parametrization of Rotary Positional Embedding

Beicheng Lou, Zifei Xu, Vivian W. H. Wong

Rotary positional embedding has become the state-of-the-art approach to encode position information in transformer-based models. While it is often succinctly expressed in complex linear algebra, we note that the actual implementation of $Q/K/V$-projections is not equivalent to a complex linear transformation. We argue that complex linear transformation is a more natural parametrization and saves near 50\% parameters within the attention block. We show empirically that removing such redundancy has negligible impact on the model performance. Our modification achieves more efficient parameter usage, as well as a cleaner interpretation of the representation space.

♻ ☆ SA-CycleGAN-2.5D: Self-Attention CycleGAN with Tri-Planar Context for Multi-Site MRI Harmonization

Ishrith Gowda, Chunwei Liu

Multi-site neuroimaging analysis is fundamentally confounded by scanner-induced covariate shifts, where the marginal distribution of voxel intensities $P(\mathbf{x})$ varies non-linearly across acquisition protocols while the conditional anatomy $P(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{x})$ remains constant. This is particularly detrimental to radiomic reproducibility, where acquisition variance often exceeds biological pathology variance. Existing statistical harmonization methods (e.g., ComBat) operate in feature space, precluding spatial downstream tasks, while standard deep learning approaches are theoretically bounded by local effective receptive fields (ERF), failing to model the global intensity correlations characteristic of field-strength bias. We propose SA-CycleGAN-2.5D, a domain adaptation framework motivated by the $HΔH$-divergence bound of Ben-David et al., integrating three architectural innovations: (1) A 2.5D tri-planar manifold injection preserving through-plane gradients $\nabla_z$ at $O(HW)$ complexity; (2) A U-ResNet generator with dense voxel-to-voxel self-attention, surpassing the $O(\sqrt{L})$ receptive field limit of CNNs to model global scanner field biases; and (3) A spectrally-normalized discriminator constraining the Lipschitz constant ($K_D \le 1$) for stable adversarial optimization. Evaluated on 654 glioma patients across two institutional domains (BraTS and UPenn-GBM), our method reduces Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) by 99.1% ($1.729 \to 0.015$) and degrades domain classifier accuracy to near-chance (59.7%). Ablation confirms that global attention is statistically essential (Cohen's $d = 1.32$, $p < 0.001$) for the harder heterogeneous-to-homogeneous translation direction. By bridging 2D efficiency and 3D consistency, our framework yields voxel-level harmonized images that preserve tumor pathophysiology, enabling reproducible multi-center radiomic analysis.

comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to MICCAI 2026

♻ ☆ But what is your honest answer? Aiding LLM-judges with honest alternatives using steering vectors

Leon Eshuijs, Archie Chaudhury, Alan McBeth, Ethan Nguyen

LLM-as-a-judge is widely used as a scalable substitute for human evaluation, yet current approaches rely on black-box access and struggle to detect subtle dishonesty, such as sycophancy and manipulation. We introduce Judge Using Safety-Steered Alternatives (JUSSA), a framework that leverages a model's internal representations to optimize an honesty-promoting steering vector from a single training example, generating contrastive alternatives that give judges a reference point for detecting dishonesty. We test JUSSA on a novel manipulation benchmark with human-validated response pairs at varying dishonesty levels, finding AUROC improvements across both GPT-4.1 (0.893 $\to$ 0.946) and Claude Haiku (0.859 $\to$ 0.929) judges, though performance degrades when task complexity is mismatched to judge capability, suggesting contrastive evaluation helps most when the task is challenging but within the judge's reach. Layer-wise analysis further shows that steering is most effective in middle layers, where model representations begin to diverge between honest and dishonest prompt processing. Our work demonstrates that steering vectors can serve as tools for evaluation rather than for improving model outputs at inference, opening a new direction for thorough white-box auditing.

♻ ☆ VT-Former: Efffcient Transformer-based Decoder for Varshamov-Tenengolts Codes

Yali Wei, Alan J. X. Guo, Zihui Yan, Yufan Dai, Wenjia Fan

In recent years, widespread attention has been drawn to the challenge of correcting insertion, deletion, and substitution (IDS) errors in DNA-based data storage. Among various IDS-correcting codes, Varshamov-Tenengolts (VT) codes, originally designed for single-error correction, have been established as a central research focus. While existing decoding methods demonstrate high accuracy for single-error correction, they are typically not applicable to the correction of multiple IDS errors. In this work, the latent capability of VT codes for multiple-error correction is investigated through a statistic-enhanced Transformer-based VT decoder (VT-Former), utilizing both symbol and statistic feature embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that VT-Former achieves nearly 100\% accuracy on correcting single errors. For multi-error decoding tasks across various codeword lengths, improvements in both frame accuracy and bit accuracy are observed, compared to conventional hard-decision and soft-in soft-out decoding algorithms. Furthermore, while lower decoding latency is exhibited by the base model compared to traditional soft decoders, the architecture is further optimized in this study to enhance decoding efficiency and reduce computational overhead.

comment: 9 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables

♻ ☆ Learning When the Concept Shifts: Confounding, Invariance, and Dimension Reduction

Kulunu Dharmakeerthi, YoonHaeng Hur, Tengyuan Liang

Practitioners often face the challenge of deploying prediction models in new environments with shifted distributions of covariates and responses. With observational data, such shifts are often driven by unobserved confounding, and can in fact alter the concept of which model is best. This paper studies distribution shifts in the domain adaptation problem with unobserved confounding. We postulate a linear structural causal model to account for endogeneity and unobserved confounding, and we leverage exogenous invariant covariate representations to cure concept shifts and improve target prediction. We propose a data-driven representation learning method that optimizes for a lower-dimensional linear subspace and a prediction model confined to that subspace. This method operates on a non-convex objective -- that interpolates between predictability and stability -- constrained to the Stiefel manifold, using an analog of projected gradient descent. We analyze the optimization landscape and prove that, provided sufficient regularization, nearly all local optima align with an invariant linear subspace resilient to distribution shifts. This method achieves a nearly ideal gap between target and source risk. We validate the method and theory with real-world data sets to illustrate the tradeoffs between predictability and stability.

♻ ☆ Learning Hyperparameters via a Data-Emphasized Variational Objective

Ethan Harvey, Mikhail Petrov, Michael C. Hughes

When training large models on limited data, avoiding overfitting is paramount. Common grid search or smarter search methods rely on expensive separate runs for each candidate hyperparameter, while carving out a validation set that reduces available training data. In this paper, we study gradient-based learning of hyperparameters via the evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective from Bayesian variational methods. This avoids the need for any validation set. We focus on scenarios where the model is over-parameterized for flexibility and the approximate posterior is chosen to be Gaussian with isotropic covariance for tractability, even though it cannot match the true posterior. In such scenarios, we find the ELBO prioritizes posteriors that match the prior, leading to severe underfitting. Instead, we recommend a data-emphasized ELBO that upweights the likelihood but not the prior. In Bayesian transfer learning of image and text classifiers, our method reduces the 88+ hour grid search of past work to under 3 hours while delivering comparable accuracy. We further demonstrate how our approach enables efficient yet accurate approximations of Gaussian processes with learnable lengthscale kernels.

comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2410.19675

♻ ☆ Graph-Dependent Regret Bounds in Multi-Armed Bandits with Interference

Fateme Jamshidi, Mohammad Shahverdikondori, Negar Kiyavash

We study multi-armed bandits under network interference, where each unit's reward depends on its own treatment and those of its neighbors in a given graph. This induces an exponentially large action space, making standard approaches computationally impractical. We propose a novel algorithm that uses the local graph structure to minimize regret. We derive a graph-dependent upper bound on cumulative regret that improves over prior work. Additionally, we provide the first lower bounds for bandits with arbitrary network interference, where each bound involves a distinct structural property of the graph. These bounds show that for both dense and sparse graphs, our algorithm is nearly optimal, with matching upper and lower bounds up to logarithmic factors. When the interference graph is unknown, a variant of our algorithm is Pareto optimal: no algorithm can uniformly outperform it across all instances. We complement our theoretical results with numerical experiments, showing that our approach outperforms the baseline methods.

♻ ☆ CayleyPy Growth: Efficient growth computations and hundreds of new conjectures on Cayley graphs (Brief version)

A. Chervov, D. Fedoriaka, E. Konstantinova, A. Naumov, I. Kiselev, A. Sheveleva, I. Koltsov, S. Lytkin, A. Smolensky, A. Soibelman, F. Levkovich-Maslyuk, R. Grimov, D. Volovich, A. Isakov, A. Kostin, M. Litvinov, N. Vilkin-Krom, A. Bidzhiev, A. Krasnyi, M. Evseev, E. Geraseva, L. Grunwald, S. Galkin, E. Koldunov, S. Diner, A. Chevychelov, E. Kudasheva, A. Sychev, A. Kravchenko, Z. Kogan, A. Natyrova, L. Shishina, L. Cheldieva, V. Zamkovoy, D. Kovalenko, O. Papulov, S. Kudashev, D. Shiltsov, R. Turtayev, O. Nikitina, D. Mamayeva, S. Nikolenko, M. Obozov, A. Titarenko, A. Dolgorukova, A. Aparnev, O. Debeaupuis, S. Alami C., H. Isambert

This is the third paper of the CayleyPy project applying artificial intelligence to problems in group theory. We announce the first public release of CayleyPy, an open source Python library for computations with Cayley and Schreier graphs. Compared with systems such as GAP and Sage, CayleyPy handles much larger graphs and performs several orders of magnitude faster. Using CayleyPy we obtained about 200 new conjectures on Cayley and Schreier graphs, focused on diameters and growth. For many Cayley graphs of symmetric groups Sn we observe quasi polynomial diameter formulas: a small set of quadratic or linear polynomials indexed by n mod s. We conjecture that this is a general phenomenon, giving efficient diameter computation despite the problem being NP hard. We propose a refinement of the Babai type conjecture on diameters of Sn: n^2/2 + 4n upper bounds in the undirected case, compared to previous O(n^2) bounds. We also provide explicit generator families, related to involutions in a square with whiskers pattern, conjectured to maximize the diameter; search confirms this for all n up to 15. We further conjecture an answer to a question posed by V M Glushkov in 1968 on directed Cayley graphs generated by a cyclic shift and a transposition. For nilpotent groups we conjecture an improvement of J S Ellenberg's results on upper unitriangular matrices over Z/pZ, showing linear dependence of diameter on p. Some conjectures are LLM friendly, naturally stated as sorting problems verifiable by algorithms or Python code. To benchmark path finding we created more than 10 Kaggle datasets. CayleyPy works with arbitrary permutation or matrix groups and includes over 100 predefined generators. Our growth computation code outperforms GAP and Sage up to 1000 times in speed and size.

comment: 46 pages, 30 figures; v2: typos fixed

♻ ☆ RoboNeuron: A Middle-Layer Infrastructure for Agent-Driven Orchestration in Embodied AI

Weifan Guan, Qinghao Hu, Huasen Xi, Chenxiao Zhang, Aosheng Li, Jian Cheng

Vision-language-action (VLA) models and LLM agents have advanced rapidly, yet reliable deployment on physical robots is often hindered by an interface mismatch between agent tool APIs and robot middleware. Current implementations typically rely on ad-hoc wrappers that are difficult to reuse, and changes to the VLA backend or serving stack often necessitate extensive re-integration. We introduce RoboNeuron, a middleware layer that connects the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for LLM agents with robot middleware such as ROS2. RoboNeuron bridges these ecosystems by deriving agent-callable tools directly from ROS schemas, providing a unified execution abstraction that supports both direct commands and modular composition, and localizing backend, runtime, and acceleration-preset changes within a stable inference boundary. We evaluate RoboNeuron in simulation and on hardware through multi-platform base control, arm motion, and VLA-based grasping tasks, demonstrating that it enables modular system orchestration under a unified interface while supporting backend transitions without system rewiring. The full code implementation of this work is available at github repo: https://github.com/guanweifan/RoboNeuron

♻ ☆ No-Regret Generative Modeling via Parabolic Monge-Ampère PDE

Nabarun Deb, Tengyuan Liang

We introduce a novel generative modeling framework based on a discretized parabolic Monge-Ampère PDE, which emerges as a continuous limit of the Sinkhorn algorithm commonly used in optimal transport. Our method performs iterative refinement in the space of Brenier maps using a mirror gradient descent step. We establish theoretical guarantees for generative modeling through the lens of no-regret analysis, demonstrating that the iterates converge to the optimal Brenier map under a variety of step-size schedules. As a technical contribution, we derive a new Evolution Variational Inequality tailored to the parabolic Monge-Ampère PDE, connecting geometry, transportation cost, and regret. Our framework accommodates non-log-concave target distributions, constructs an optimal sampling process via the Brenier map, and integrates favorable learning techniques from generative adversarial networks and score-based diffusion models. As direct applications, we illustrate how our theory paves new pathways for generative modeling and variational inference.

comment: 30 pages, 7 figures. Journal version accepted for publication in the Annals of Statistics

♻ ☆ A Gaussian Process View on Observation Noise and Initialization in Wide Neural Networks

Sergio Calvo-Ordoñez, Jonathan Plenk, Richard Bergna, Alvaro Cartea, Jose Miguel Hernandez-Lobato, Konstantina Palla, Kamil Ciosek

Performing gradient descent in a wide neural network is equivalent to computing the posterior mean of a Gaussian Process with the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK-GP), for a specific prior mean and with zero observation noise. However, existing formulations have two limitations: (i) the NTK-GP assumes noiseless targets, leading to misspecification on noisy data; (ii) the equivalence does not extend to arbitrary prior means, which are essential for well-specified models. To address (i), we introduce a regularizer into the training objective, showing its correspondence to incorporating observation noise in the NTK-GP. To address (ii), we propose a \textit{shifted network} that enables arbitrary prior means and allows obtaining the posterior mean with gradient descent on a single network, without ensembling or kernel inversion. We validate our results with experiments across datasets and architectures, showing that this approach removes key obstacles to the practical use of NTK-GP equivalence in applied Gaussian process modeling.

comment: AISTATS 2026, Camera-ready version

♻ ☆ TempoControl: Temporal Attention Guidance for Text-to-Video Models CVPR'26

Shira Schiber, Ofir Lindenbaum, Idan Schwartz

Recent advances in generative video models have enabled the creation of high-quality videos based on natural language prompts. However, these models frequently lack fine-grained temporal control, meaning they do not allow users to specify when particular visual elements should appear within a generated sequence. In this work, we introduce TempoControl, a method that allows for temporal alignment of visual concepts during inference, without requiring retraining or additional supervision. TempoControl utilizes cross-attention maps, a key component of text-to-video diffusion models, to guide the timing of concepts through a novel optimization approach. Our method steers attention using three complementary principles: aligning its temporal pattern with a control signal (correlation), adjusting its strength where visibility is required (magnitude), and preserving semantic consistency (entropy). TempoControl provides precise temporal control while maintaining high video quality and diversity. We demonstrate its effectiveness across various applications, including temporal reordering of single and multiple objects, action timing, and audio-aligned video generation. Project page: https://shira-schiber.github.io/TempoControl/.

comment: Accepted CVPR'26

♻ ☆ Taxonomy-Conditioned Hierarchical Bayesian TSB Models for Heterogeneous Intermittent Demand Forecasting

Zong-Han Bai, Po-Yen Chu

Intermittent demand forecasting poses unique challenges due to sparse observations, cold-start items, and obsolescence. Classical models such as Croston, SBA, and the Teunter--Syntetos--Babai (TSB) method provide simple heuristics but lack a principled generative foundation. We introduce TSB-HB, a hierarchical Bayesian extension of TSB. Demand occurrence is modeled with a Beta--Binomial distribution, while nonzero demand sizes follow a Log-Normal distribution. Crucially, hierarchical priors enable partial pooling across items, stabilizing estimates for sparse or cold-start series while preserving heterogeneity. This framework provides a coherent generative reinterpretation of the classical TSB structure. On the UCI Online Retail dataset, TSB-HB achieves the lowest RMSE and RMSSE among all baselines, while remaining competitive in MAE. On a 5,000-series M5 sample, it improves MAE and RMSE over classical intermittent baselines. Under the calibrated probabilistic configuration, TSB-HB yields competitive pinball loss and a favorable sharpness--calibration tradeoff among the parametric baselines reported in the main text.

comment: Preprint. 13 pages,4 figures, Equal contribution by the two authors

♻ ☆ D4C: Data-Free Quantization for Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Models CVPR

Wenlun Zhang, Yunshan Zhong, Zihao Ding, Xinyu Li, Kentaro Yoshioka

Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) offers a practical solution for model compression without requiring access to real data, making it particularly attractive in privacy-sensitive scenarios. While DFQ has shown promise for unimodal models, its extension to Vision-Language Models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models remains underexplored. In this work, we reveal that directly applying existing DFQ techniques to CLIP results in substantial performance degradation due to two key limitations: insufficient semantic content and low intra-image diversity in synthesized samples. To tackle these challenges, we propose D4C, the first DFQ framework tailored for CLIP. D4C synthesizes semantically rich and structurally diverse pseudo images through three key components: 1) Prompt-Guided Semantic Injection aligns generated images with real-world semantics using text prompts; 2) Structural Contrastive Generation reproduces compositional structures of natural images by leveraging foreground-background contrastive synthesis; and 3) Perturbation-Aware Enhancement applies controlled perturbations to improve sample diversity and robustness. These components jointly empower D4C to synthesize images that are both semantically informative and structurally diverse, effectively bridging the performance gap of DFQ on CLIP. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of D4C, showing significant performance improvements on various bit-widths and models.

comment: Accepted to CVPRF 2026

♻ ☆ Variance-Based Pruning for Accelerating and Compressing Trained Networks ICCV'25

Uranik Berisha, Jens Mehnert, Alexandru Paul Condurache

Increasingly expensive training of ever larger models such as Vision Transfomers motivate reusing the vast library of already trained state-of-the-art networks. However, their latency, high computational costs and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment, especially on resource-constrained hardware. While structured pruning methods can reduce these factors, they often require costly retraining, sometimes for up to hundreds of epochs, or even training from scratch to recover the lost accuracy resulting from the structural modifications. Maintaining the provided performance of trained models after structured pruning and thereby avoiding extensive retraining remains a challenge. To solve this, we introduce Variance-Based Pruning, a simple and structured one-shot pruning technique for efficiently compressing networks, with minimal finetuning. Our approach first gathers activation statistics, which are used to select neurons for pruning. Simultaneously the mean activations are integrated back into the model to preserve a high degree of performance. On ImageNet-1k recognition tasks, we demonstrate that directly after pruning DeiT-Base retains over 70% of its original performance and requires only 10 epochs of fine-tuning to regain 99% of the original accuracy while simultaneously reducing MACs by 35% and model size by 36%, thus speeding up the model by 1.44x. The code is available at: https://github.com/boschresearch/variance-based-pruning

comment: Accepted as Oral at ICCV'25 (IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision)

♻ ☆ Scale-adaptive and robust intrinsic dimension estimation via optimal neighbourhood identification

Antonio Di Noia, Iuri Macocco, Aldo Glielmo, Alessandro Laio, Antonietta Mira

The Intrinsic Dimension (ID) is a key concept in unsupervised learning and feature selection, as it is a lower bound to the number of variables which are necessary to describe a system. However, in almost any real-world dataset the ID depends on the scale at which the data are analysed. Quite typically at a small scale, the ID is very large, as the data are affected by measurement errors. At large scale, the ID can also appear erroneously large, due to the curvature and the topology of the manifold containing the data. In this work, we introduce an automatic protocol to select the sweet spot, namely the correct range of scales in which the ID is meaningful and useful. This protocol is based on imposing that for distances smaller than the correct scale the density of the data is constant. In the presented framework, to estimate the density it is necessary to know the ID, therefore, this condition is imposed self-consistently. We illustrate the usefulness and robustness of this procedure to noise by benchmarks on artificial and real-world datasets.

♻ ☆ Activation Steering via Generative Causal Mediation

Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Amir Zur, Atticus Geiger, Dylan Hadfield-Menell

Where should we intervene in a language model (LM) to localize and control behaviors that are diffused across many tokens of a long-form response? We introduce Generative Causal Mediation (GCM), a procedure for selecting model components (e.g., attention heads) from contrastive long-form responses, to steer such diffuse concepts (e.g., talk in verse vs. talk in prose). In GCM, we first construct a dataset of contrasting behavioral inputs and long-form responses. Then, we quantify how model components mediate the concept and select the strongest mediators for steering. We evaluate GCM on three behaviors--refusal, sycophancy, and style transfer--across three language models. GCM successfully localizes concepts expressed in long-form responses and outperforms correlational probe-based baselines when steering with a sparse set of attention heads. Together, these results demonstrate that GCM provides an effective approach for localizing from and controlling the long-form responses of LMs.

♻ ☆ Code Comprehension then Auditing for Unsupervised LLM Evaluation

Bhrij Patel, Souradip Chakraborty, Mengdi Wang, Dinesh Manocha, Amrit Singh Bedi

Large Language Models (LLMs) for unsupervised code correctness evaluation have recently gained attention because they can judge if code runs as intended without requiring reference implementations or unit tests, which may be unavailable, sparse, or unreliable. However, most prior approaches condition LLM evaluators directly on the full code implementation, forcing the model to jointly infer program behavior and evaluate correctness in a single step. This entanglement leads to misinterpretations of code behavior and unreliable judgments. To mitigate this issue, we introduce CoCoA, an unsupervised Code Comprehension then Auditing framework that first comprehends functionality to generate a natural-language explanation. Then it evaluates task alignment based on this explanation. By sequentially sampling comprehension before evaluation, CoCoA improves the quality of inferred program behavior and enables the evaluator to focus on behavioral alignment rather than raw implementation details. Across multiple datasets, programming languages, and models, CoCoA achieves up to $68\%$ increased F1 score and up to $20\%$ increased accuracy over the best-performing baselines.

comment: 19 pages

♻ ☆ CHEEM: Continual Learning by Reuse, New, Adapt and Skip -- A Hierarchical Exploration-Exploitation Approach CVPR 2026

Chinmay Savadikar, Michelle Dai, Tianfu Wu

To effectively manage the complexities of real-world dynamic environments, continual learning must incrementally acquire, update, and accumulate knowledge from a stream of tasks of different nature without suffering from catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge. While this capability is innate to human cognition, it remains a significant challenge for modern deep learning systems. At the heart of this challenge lies the stability-plasticity dilemma: the need to balance leveraging prior knowledge, integrating novel information, and allocating model capacity adaptively based on task complexity and synergy. In this paper, we propose a novel exemplar-free class-incremental continual learning (ExfCCL) framework that addresses these issues through a Hierarchical Exploration-Exploitation (HEE) approach. The core of our method is a HEE-guided efficient neural architecture search (HEE-NAS) that enables a learning-to-adapt backbone via four primitive operations - reuse, new, adapt, and skip - thereby serving as an internal memory that dynamically updates selected components across streaming tasks. To address the task ID inference problem in ExfCCL, we exploit an external memory of task centroids proposed in the prior art. We term our method CHEEM (Continual Hierarchical-Exploration-Exploitation Memory). CHEEM is evaluated on the challenging MTIL and VDD benchmarks using both Tiny and Base Vision Transformers and a proposed holistic Figure-of-Merit (FoM) metric. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting-based continual learning methods, closely approaching full fine-tuning upper bounds. Furthermore, it learns adaptive model structures tailored to individual tasks in a semantically meaningful way. Our code is available at https://github.com/savadikarc/cheem .

comment: CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Causal K-Means Clustering

Kwangho Kim, Jisu Kim, Edward H. Kennedy

Causal effects are often characterized with population summaries. These might provide an incomplete picture when there are heterogeneous treatment effects across subgroups. Since the subgroup structure is typically unknown, it is more challenging to identify and evaluate subgroup effects than population effects. We propose a new solution to this problem: \emph{Causal k-Means Clustering}, which harnesses the widely-used k-means clustering algorithm to uncover the unknown subgroup structure. Our problem differs significantly from the conventional clustering setup since the variables to be clustered are unknown counterfactual functions. We present a plug-in estimator which is simple and readily implementable using off-the-shelf algorithms, and study its rate of convergence. We also develop a new bias-corrected estimator based on nonparametric efficiency theory and double machine learning, and show that this estimator achieves fast root-n rates and asymptotic normality in large nonparametric models. Our proposed methods are especially useful for modern outcome-wide studies with multiple treatment levels. Further, our framework is extensible to clustering with generic pseudo-outcomes, such as partially observed outcomes or otherwise unknown functions. Finally, we explore finite sample properties via simulation, and illustrate the proposed methods using a study of mobile-supported self-management for chronic low back pain.

♻ ☆ BN-Pool: Bayesian Nonparametric Pooling for Graphs

Daniele Castellana, Filippo Maria Bianchi

We introduce BN-Pool, the first clustering-based pooling method for Graph Neural Networks that adaptively determines the number of supernodes in a coarsened graph. BN-Pool leverages a generative model based on a Bayesian nonparametric framework for partitioning graph nodes into an unbounded number of clusters. During training, the node-to-cluster assignments are learned by combining the supervised loss of the downstream task with an unsupervised auxiliary term, which encourages the reconstruction of the original graph topology while penalizing unnecessary proliferation of clusters. By automatically discovering the optimal coarsening level for each graph, BN-Pool preserves the performance of soft-clustering pooling methods while avoiding their typical redundancy by learning compact pooled graphs. The code is available at https://github.com/NGMLGroup/Bayesian-Nonparametric-Graph-Pooling.

♻ ☆ Exact Graph Learning via Integer Programming

Lucas Kook, Søren Wengel Mogensen

Learning the dependence structure among variables in complex systems is a central problem across medical, natural, and social sciences. These structures can be naturally represented by graphs, and the task of inferring such graphs from data is known as graph learning or causal discovery. Existing approaches typically rely on restrictive assumptions about the data-generating process, employ greedy oracle algorithms, or solve approximate formulations of the graph learning problem. Therefore, they are either sensitive to violations of central assumptions or fail to guarantee globally optimal solutions. We address these limitations by introducing a nonparametric graph learning framework based on conditional independence testing and integer programming. We reformulate the graph learning problem as a mixed-integer program and prove that solving this integer-programming problem provides a globally optimal solution to the original graph learning problem. Our method leverages efficient encodings of graphical separation criteria, enabling the exact recovery of larger graphs than was previously feasible. We provide an open-source R package 'glip' which supports learning (acyclic) directed (mixed) graphs and chain graphs. We demonstrate that our approach is often faster than existing exact graph learning procedures and achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated and benchmark data across all aforementioned classes of graphs.

♻ ☆ Natural Hypergradient Descent: Algorithm Design, Convergence Analysis, and Parallel Implementation

Deyi Kong, Zaiwei Chen, Shuzhong Zhang, Shancong Mou

In this work, we propose Natural Hypergradient Descent (NHGD), a new method for solving bilevel optimization problems. To address the computational bottleneck in hypergradient estimation--namely, the need to compute or approximate Hessian inverse--we exploit the statistical structure of the inner optimization problem and use the empirical Fisher information matrix as an asymptotically consistent surrogate for the Hessian. This design enables a parallel optimize-and-approximate framework in which the Hessian-inverse approximation is updated synchronously with the stochastic inner optimization, reusing gradient information at negligible additional cost. Our main theoretical contribution establishes high-probability error bounds and sample complexity guarantees for NHGD that match those of state-of-the-art optimize-then-approximate methods, while significantly reducing computational time overhead. Empirical evaluations on representative bilevel learning tasks further demonstrate the practical advantages of NHGD, highlighting its scalability and effectiveness in large-scale machine learning settings.

♻ ☆ Neural Conditional Transport Maps

Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Leonardo Chiani, Emanuele Borgonovo, Massimo Tavoni

We present a neural framework for learning conditional optimal transport (OT) maps between probability distributions. Our approach introduces a conditioning mechanism capable of processing both categorical and continuous conditioning variables simultaneously. At the core of our method lies a hypernetwork that generates transport layer parameters based on these inputs, creating adaptive mappings that outperform simpler conditioning methods. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the superior performance of our method over baseline configurations. Furthermore, we showcase an application to global sensitivity analysis, offering high performance in computing OT-based sensitivity indices. This work advances the state-of-the-art in conditional optimal transport, enabling broader application of optimal transport principles to complex, high-dimensional domains such as generative modeling and black-box model explainability.

comment: Published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research

♻ ☆ PluriHopRAG: Exhaustive, Recall-Sensitive QA Through Corpus-Specific Document Structure Learning

Mykolas Sveistrys, Richard Kunert

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been used in question answering (QA) systems to improve performance when relevant information is in one (single-hop) or multiple (multi-hop) passages. However, many real life scenarios (e.g. dealing with financial, legal, medical reports) require checking all documents for relevant information without a clear stopping condition. We term these pluri-hop questions, and formalize them by 3 conditions - recall sensitivity, exhaustiveness, and exactness. To study this setting, we introduce PluriHopWIND, a multilingual diagnostic benchmark of 48 pluri-hop questions over 191 real wind-industry reports, with high repetitiveness to reflect the challenge of distractors in real-world datasets. Naive, graph-based, and multimodal RAG methods only reach up to 40% statement-wise F1 on PluriHopWIND. Motivated by this, we propose PluriHopRAG, which learns from synthetic examples to decompose queries according to corpus-specific document structure, and employs a cross-encoder filter at the document level to minimize costly LLM reasoning. We test PluriHopRAG on PluriHopWIND and the Loong benchmark built on financial, legal and scientific reports. On PluriHopWIND, our method shows 18-52% F1 score improvement across base LLMs, while on Loong, we show 33% improvement over long-context reasoning and 52% improvement over naive RAG.

♻ ☆ A Pure Hypothesis Test for Inhomogeneous Random Graph Models Based on a Kernelised Stein Discrepancy

Anum Fatima, Gesine Reinert

Complex data are often represented as a graph, which in turn can often be viewed as a realisation of a random graph, such as an inhomogeneous random graph model (IRG). For general fast goodness-of-fit tests in high dimensions, kernelised Stein discrepancy (KSD) tests are a powerful tool. Here, we develop a KSD-type test for IRG models that can be carried out with a single observation of the network. The test applies to a network of any size, but is particularly interesting for small networks for which asymptotic tests are not warranted. We also provide theoretical guarantees.

comment: 53 pages, 21 figures

♻ ☆ DreamerAD: Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Latent World Model for Autonomous Driving

Pengxuan Yang, Yupeng Zheng, Deheng Qian, Zebin Xing, Qichao Zhang, Linbo Wang, Yichen Zhang, Shaoyu Guo, Zhongpu Xia, Qiang Chen, Junyu Han, Lingyun Xu, Yifeng Pan, Dongbin Zhao

We introduce DreamerAD, the first latent world model framework that enables efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving by compressing diffusion sampling from 100 steps to 1 - achieving 80x speedup while maintaining visual interpretability. Training RL policies on real-world driving data incurs prohibitive costs and safety risks. While existing pixel-level diffusion world models enable safe imagination-based training, they suffer from multi-step diffusion inference latency (2s/frame) that prevents high-frequency RL interaction. Our approach leverages denoised latent features from video generation models through three key mechanisms: (1) shortcut forcing that reduces sampling complexity via recursive multi-resolution step compression, (2) an autoregressive dense reward model operating directly on latent representations for fine-grained credit assignment, and (3) Gaussian vocabulary sampling for GRPO that constrains exploration to physically plausible trajectories. DreamerAD achieves 87.7 EPDMS on NavSim v2, establishing state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating that latent-space RL is effective for autonomous driving.

comment: authors update

♻ ☆ NES: An Instruction-Free, Low-Latency Next Edit Suggestion Framework Powered by Learned Historical Editing Trajectories

Xinfang Chen, Siyang Xiao, Xianying Zhu, Junhong Xie, Ming Liang, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li, Peng Di

Code editing is a frequent yet cognitively demanding task in software development. Existing AI-powered tools often disrupt developer flow by requiring explicit natural language instructions and suffer from high latency, limiting real-world usability. We present NES (Next Edit Suggestion), an instruction-free, low-latency code editing framework that leverages learned historical editing trajectories to implicitly capture developers' goals and coding habits. NES features a dual-model architecture: one model predicts the next edit location and the other generates the precise code change, both without any user instruction. Trained on our open-sourced SFT and DAPO datasets, NES achieves state-of-the-art performance (75.6% location accuracy, 27.7% exact match rate) while delivering suggestions in under 250ms. Deployed at Ant Group, NES serves over 20,000 developers through a seamless Tab-key interaction, achieving effective acceptance rates of 51.55% for location predictions and 43.44% for edits, demonstrating its practical impact in real-world development workflows.

comment: Accepted by FSE'26 Industry Track

♻ ☆ On the Non-Identifiability of Steering Vectors in Large Language Models

Sohan Venkatesh, Ashish Mahendran Kurapath

Activation steering methods are widely used to control large language model (LLM) behavior and are often interpreted as revealing meaningful internal representations. This interpretation assumes that steering directions are identifiable and uniquely recoverable from input-output behavior. We show that, under white-box single-layer access, steering vectors are fundamentally non-identifiable due to large equivalence classes of behaviorally indistinguishable interventions. Empirically, we find that orthogonal perturbations achieve near-equivalent efficacy with negligible effect sizes across multiple models and traits, with pre-trained semantic classifiers confirming equivalence at the output level. We estimate null-space dimensionality via SVD of activation covariance matrices and validate that equivalence holds robustly throughout the operationally relevant steering range. Critically, we show that non-identifiability is a robust geometric property that persists across diverse prompt distributions. These findings reveal fundamental interpretability limits and highlight the need for structural constraints beyond behavioral testing to enable reliable alignment interventions.

comment: Code available at https://github.com/sohv/non-identifiability

♻ ☆ Disentanglement of Sources in a Multi-Stream Variational Autoencoder

Veranika Boukun, Jörg Lücke

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are among leading approaches to address the problem of learning disentangled representations. Typically a single VAE is used and disentangled representations are sought within its single continuous latent space. In this paper, we propose and provide a proof of concept for a novel Multi-Stream Variational Autoencoder (MS-VAE) that achieves disentanglement of sources by combining discrete and continuous latents. The discrete latents are used in an explicit source combination model, that superimposes a set of sources as part of the MS-VAE decoder. We formally define the MS-VAE approach, derive its inference and learning equations, and numerically investigate its principled functionality. The MS-VAE model is very flexible and can be trained using little supervision (we use fully unsupervised learning after pretraining with some labels). In our numerical experiments, we explored the ability of the MS-VAE approach in separating both superimposed hand-written digits as well as sound sources. For the former task we used superimposed MNIST digits (an increasingly common benchmark). For sound separation, our experiments focused on the task of speaker diarization in a recording conversation between two speakers. In all cases, we observe a clear separation of sources and competitive performance after training. For digit superpositions, performance is particularly competitive in complex mixtures (e.g., three and four digits). For the speaker diarization task, we observe an especially low rate of missed speakers and a more precise speaker attribution. Numerical experiments confirm the flexibility of the approach across varying amounts of supervision, and we observed high performance, e.g., when using just 10% of the labels for pretraining.

comment: 14 pages, 4 figures; expanded literature review, added Algorithm 1, and included new benchmarking results on fixed number of overlapping MNIST sources

♻ ☆ MCMC-Correction of Score-Based Diffusion Models for Model Composition

Anders Sjöberg, Jakob Lindqvist, Magnus Önnheim, Mats Jirstrand, Lennart Svensson

Diffusion models can be parameterized in terms of either score or energy function. The energy parameterization is attractive as it enables sampling procedures such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) that incorporates a Metropolis--Hastings (MH) correction step based on energy differences between proposed samples. Such corrections can significantly improve sampling quality, particularly in the context of model composition, where pre-trained models are combined to generate samples from novel distributions. Score-based diffusion models, on the other hand, are more widely adopted and come with a rich ecosystem of pre-trained models. However, they do not, in general, define an underlying energy function, making MH-based sampling inapplicable. In this work, we address this limitation by retaining score parameterization and introducing a novel MH-like acceptance rule based on line integration of the score function. This allows the reuse of existing diffusion models while still combining the reverse process with various MCMC techniques, viewed as an instance of annealed MCMC. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we show that our MH-like samplers {yield relative improvements of similar magnitude to those observed} with energy-based models, without requiring explicit energy parameterization.

comment: 27 pages. Published in Entropy 28(3):351 (2026). This version matches the published content

♻ ☆ HISA: Efficient Hierarchical Indexing for Fine-Grained Sparse Attention

Yufei Xu, Fanxu Meng, Fan Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Ruijie Zhou, Zhaohui Wang, Jiexi Wu, Zhixin Pan, Xiaojuan Tang, Wenjie Pei, Tongxuan Liu, Di yin, Xing Sun, Muhan Zhang

Token-level sparse attention mechanisms, exemplified by DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), achieve fine-grained key selection by scoring every historical key for each query through a lightweight indexer, then computing attention only on the selected subset. While the downstream sparse attention itself scales favorably, the indexer must still scan the entire prefix for every query, introducing an per-layer bottleneck that grows prohibitively with context length. We propose HISA (Hierarchical Indexed Sparse Attention), a plug-and-play replacement for the indexer that rewrites the search path from a flat token scan into a two-stage hierarchical procedure: (1) a block-level coarse filtering stage that scores pooled block representations to discard irrelevant regions, followed by (2) a token-level refinement stage that applies the original indexer exclusively within the retained candidate blocks. HISA preserves the identical token-level top-sparse pattern consumed by the downstream Sparse MLA operator and requires no additional training. On kernel-level benchmarks, HISA achieves up to speedup at 64K context. On Needle-in-a-Haystack and LongBench, we directly replace the indexer in DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-5 with our HISA indexer, without any finetuning. HISA closely matches the original DSA in quality, while substantially outperforming block-sparse baselines.

♻ ☆ E-Scores for (In)Correctness Assessment of Generative Model Outputs

Guneet S. Dhillon, Javier González, Teodora Pandeva, Alicia Curth

While generative models, especially large language models (LLMs), are ubiquitous in today's world, principled mechanisms to assess their (in)correctness are limited. Using the conformal prediction framework, previous works construct sets of LLM responses where the probability of including an incorrect response, or error, is capped at a user-defined tolerance level. However, since these methods are based on p-values, they are susceptible to p-hacking, i.e., choosing the tolerance level post-hoc can invalidate the guarantees. We therefore leverage e-values to complement generative model outputs with e-scores as measures of incorrectness. In addition to achieving the guarantees as before, e-scores further provide users with the flexibility of choosing data-dependent tolerance levels while upper bounding size distortion, a post-hoc notion of error. We experimentally demonstrate their efficacy in assessing LLM outputs under different forms of correctness: mathematical factuality and property constraints satisfaction.

comment: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2026

♻ ☆ Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts

Maciej Besta, Florim Memedi, Zhenyu Zhang, Robert Gerstenberger, Guangyuan Piao, Nils Blach, Piotr Nyczyk, Marcin Copik, Grzegorz Kwaśniewski, Jürgen Müller, Lukas Gianinazzi, Ales Kubicek, Hubert Niewiadomski, Aidan O'Mahony, Onur Mutlu, Torsten Hoefler

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant progress in recent years, with a notable focus on improving large language models' (LLM) performance through innovative prompting techniques. Among these, prompt engineering coupled with structures has emerged as a promising paradigm, with designs such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree of Thoughts, or Graph of Thoughts, in which the overall LLM reasoning is guided by a structure such as a graph. As illustrated with numerous examples, this paradigm significantly enhances the LLM's capability to solve numerous tasks, ranging from logical or mathematical reasoning to planning or creative writing. To facilitate the understanding of this growing field and pave the way for future developments, we devise a general blueprint for effective and efficient LLM reasoning schemes. For this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the prompt execution pipeline, clarifying and clearly defining different concepts. We then build the first taxonomy of structure-enhanced LLM reasoning schemes. We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures, algorithms executed with these structures, and many others. We refer to these structures as reasoning topologies, because their representation becomes to a degree spatial, as they are contained within the LLM context. Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost. We also outline theoretical underpinnings, relationships between prompting and other parts of the LLM ecosystem such as knowledge bases, and the associated research challenges. Our work will help to advance future prompt engineering techniques.

♻ ☆ Binned semiparametric Bayesian networks for efficient kernel density estimation

Rafael Sojo, Javier Díaz-Rozo, Concha Bielza, Pedro Larrañaga

This paper introduces a new type of probabilistic semiparametric model that takes advantage of data binning to reduce the computational cost of kernel density estimation in nonparametric distributions. Two new conditional probability distributions are developed for the new binned semiparametric Bayesian networks, the sparse binned kernel density estimation and the Fourier kernel density estimation. These two probability distributions address the curse of dimensionality, which typically impacts binned models, by using sparse tensors and restricting the number of parent nodes in conditional probability calculations. To evaluate the proposal, we perform a complexity analysis and conduct several comparative experiments using synthetic data and datasets from the UCI Machine Learning repository. The experiments include different binning rules, parent restrictions, grid sizes, and number of instances to get a holistic view of the model's behavior. As a result, our binned semiparametric Bayesian networks achieve structural learning and log-likelihood estimations with no statistically significant differences compared to the semiparametric Bayesian networks, but at a much higher speed. Thus, the new binned semiparametric Bayesian networks prove to be a reliable and more efficient alternative to their non-binned counterparts.

comment: Major revision after reviewer comments. Title changed based on reviewer suggestion. Improved introduction, complexity analysis and experiments. Submitted to Information Sciences

♻ ☆ Incoherence in Goal-Conditioned Autoregressive Models

Jacek Karwowski, Raymond Douglas

We investigate mathematically the notion of incoherence: a structural issue with reinforcement learning policies derived by naive goal-conditioning of autoregressive models. We focus on the process of re-training models on their own actions, that is, fine-tuning offline-learned policies with online RL. We prove that it decreases incoherence and leads to an improvement in return, and we aim to characterize the resulting trajectory of policies. By re-framing standard notions of control-as-inference and soft Q learning, we establish a three-way correspondence with two other ways of understanding the iterative re-training process: as folding the posterior into the reward and, in the deterministic case, as decreasing the temperature parameter; the correspondence has computational content via the training-inference trade-off. Through soft-conditioning generative models, we discuss the link between incoherence and the effective horizon.

comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2026

♻ ☆ The No-Clash Teaching Dimension is Bounded by VC Dimension

Jiahua Liu, Benchong Li

In the realm of machine learning theory, to prevent unnatural coding schemes between teacher and learner, No-Clash Teaching Dimension was introduced as provably optimal complexity measure for collusion-free teaching. However, whether No-Clash Teaching Dimension is upper-bounded by Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension remains unknown. In this paper, for any finite concept class, we construct fragments of size equals to its Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension which identify concepts through an ordered compression scheme. Naturally, these fragments are used as teaching sets, one can easily see that they satisfy the non-clashing condition, i.e., this open question is resolved for finite concept classes.

♻ ☆ SetONet: A Set-Based Operator Network for Solving PDEs with Variable-Input Sampling

Stepan Tretiakov, Xingjian Li, Krishna Kumar

Most neural-operator surrogates for PDEs inherit from DeepONet-style formulations the requirement that the input function be sampled at a fixed, ordered set of sensors. This assumption limits applicability to problems with variable sensor layouts, missing data, point sources, and sample-based representations of densities. We propose SetONet, which addresses this gap by recasting the operator input as an unordered set of coordinate-value observations and encoding it with permutation-invariant aggregation inside a standard branch-trunk operator network while preserving the DeepONet synthesis mechanism and lightweight end-to-end training. A structured variant, SetONet-Key, aggregates sensor information through learnable query tokens and a position-only key pathway, thereby decoupling sampling geometry from sensor values. The method is assessed on four classical operator-learning benchmarks under fixed layouts, variable layouts, and evaluation-time sensor drop-off, and on four problems with inherently unstructured point-cloud inputs, including heat conduction with multiple point sources, advection-diffusion, phase-screen diffraction, and optimal transport problems. In parameter-matched studies, SetONet-Key achieves lower error than the DeepONet baseline on fixed-sensor benchmarks and remains reliable when layouts vary or sensors are dropped at evaluation. Comparisons across pooling rules show that attention-based aggregation is typically more robust than mean or sum pooling. On the point-cloud problems, SetONet operates directly on the native input representation, without rasterization or multi-stage preprocessing, and outperforms the larger VIDON baseline.

♻ ☆ Order Optimal Regret Bounds for Sharpe Ratio Optimization under Thompson Sampling

Mohammad Taha Shah, Sabrina Khurshid, Gourab Ghatak

In this paper, we study sequential decision-making for maximizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) in a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. Unlike standard bandit formulations that maximize cumulative reward, SR optimization requires balancing expected return and reward variability. As a result, the learning objective depends jointly on the mean and variance of the reward distribution and takes a fractional form. To address this problem, we propose the Sharpe Ratio Thompson Sampling \texttt{SRTS}, a Bayesian algorithm for risk-adjusted exploration. For Gaussian reward models, the algorithm employs a Normal-Gamma conjugate posterior to capture uncertainty in both the mean and the precision of each arm. In contrast to additive mean-variance (MV) formulations, which often require different algorithms across risk regimes, the fractional SR objective yields a single sampling rule that applies uniformly across risk tolerances. On the theoretical side, we develop a regret decomposition tailored to the SR objective and introduce a decoupling approach that separates the contributions of mean and variance uncertainty. This framework allows us to control the interaction between the Gaussian mean samples and the Gamma precision samples arising in the posterior. Using these results, we establish a finite-time distribution-dependent $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ upper bound on the expected regret. We further derive a matching information-theoretic lower bound using a change-of-measure argument, showing that the proposed algorithm is order-optimal. Finally, experiments on synthetic bandit environments illustrate the performance of \texttt{SRTS} and demonstrate improvements over existing risk-aware bandit algorithms across a range of risk-return settings.

♻ ☆ EvalBlocks: A Modular Pipeline for Rapidly Evaluating Foundation Models in Medical Imaging

Jan Tagscherer, Sarah de Boer, Lena Philipp, Fennie van der Graaf, Dré Peeters, Joeran Bosma, Lars Leijten, Bogdan Obreja, Ewoud Smit, Alessa Hering

Developing foundation models in medical imaging requires continuous monitoring of downstream performance. Researchers are burdened with tracking numerous experiments, design choices, and their effects on performance, often relying on ad-hoc, manual workflows that are inherently slow and error-prone. We introduce EvalBlocks, a modular, plug-and-play framework for efficient evaluation of foundation models during development. Built on Snakemake, EvalBlocks supports seamless integration of new datasets, foundation models, aggregation methods, and evaluation strategies. All experiments and results are tracked centrally and are reproducible with a single command, while efficient caching and parallel execution enable scalable use on shared compute infrastructure. Demonstrated on five state-of-the-art foundation models and three medical imaging classification tasks, EvalBlocks streamlines model evaluation, enabling researchers to iterate faster and focus on model innovation rather than evaluation logistics. The framework is released as open source software at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/eval-blocks.

comment: Accepted and published in BVM 2026 proceedings (Springer)

♻ ☆ Grow, Assess, Compress: Adaptive Backbone Scaling for Memory-Efficient Class Incremental Learning

Adrian Garcia-Castañeda, Jon Irureta, Jon Imaz, Aizea Lojo

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) poses a fundamental challenge: maintaining a balance between the plasticity required to learn new tasks and the stability needed to prevent catastrophic forgetting. While expansion-based methods effectively mitigate forgetting by adding task-specific parameters, they suffer from uncontrolled architectural growth and memory overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic scaling framework that adaptively manages model capacity through a cyclic "GRow, Assess, ComprEss" (GRACE) strategy. Crucially, we supplement backbone expansion with a novel saturation assessment phase that evaluates the utilization of the model's capacity. This assessment allows the framework to make informed decisions to either expand the architecture or compress the backbones into a streamlined representation, preventing parameter explosion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple CIL benchmarks, while reducing memory footprint by up to a 73% compared to purely expansionist models.

♻ ☆ From Density Matrices to Phase Transitions in Deep Learning: Spectral Early Warnings and Interpretability

Max Hennick, Guillaume Corlouer

A key problem in the modern study of AI is predicting and understanding emergent capabilities in models during training. Inspired by methods for studying reactions in quantum chemistry, we present the ``2-datapoint reduced density matrix". We show that this object provides a computationally efficient, unified observable of phase transitions during training. By tracking the eigenvalue statistics of the 2RDM over a sliding window, we derive two complementary signals: the spectral heat capacity, which we prove provides early warning of second-order phase transitions via critical slowing down, and the participation ratio, which reveals the dimensionality of the underlying reorganization. Remarkably, the top eigenvectors of the 2RDM are directly interpretable making it straightforward to study the nature of the transitions. We validate across four distinct settings: deep linear networks, induction head formation, grokking, and emergent misalignment. We then discuss directions for future work using the 2RDM.

♻ ☆ Non-Asymptotic Convergence of Discrete Diffusion Models: Masked and Random Walk dynamics

Giovanni Conforti, Alain Durmus, Le-Tuyet-Nhi Pham, Gael Raoul

Diffusion models for continuous state spaces based on Gaussian noising processes are now relatively well understood from both practical and theoretical perspectives. In contrast, results for diffusion models on discrete state spaces remain far less explored and pose significant challenges, particularly due to their combinatorial structure and their more recent introduction in generative modelling. In this work, we establish new and sharp convergence guarantees for three popular discrete diffusion models (DDMs). Two of these models are designed for finite state spaces and are based respectively on the random walk and the masking process. The third DDM we consider is defined on the countably infinite space $\mathbb{N}^d$ and uses a drifted random walk as its forward process. For each of these models, the backward process can be characterized by a discrete score function that can, in principle, be estimated. However, even with perfect access to these scores, simulating the exact backward process is infeasible, and one must rely on time discretization. In this work, we study Euler-type approximations and establish convergence bounds in both Kullback-Leibler divergence and total variation distance for the resulting models, under minimal assumptions on the data distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the optimal non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for these noising processes that do not rely on boundedness assumptions on the estimated score. In particular, the computational complexity of each method scales only linearly in the dimension, up to logarithmic factors.

♻ ☆ Double-Diffusion: ODE-Prior Accelerated Diffusion Models for Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting

Hanlin Dong, Arian Prabowo, Hao Xue, Ao Shuang, Tianyi Zhou, Flora D. Salim

Forecasting over graph-structured sensor networks demands models that capture both deterministic spatial trends and stochastic variability, while remaining efficient enough for repeated inference as new observations arrive. We propose Double-Diffusion, a denoising diffusion probabilistic model that integrates a parameter-free graph diffusion Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) forecast as a structural prior throughout the generative process. Unlike standard diffusion approaches that generate predictions from pure noise, Double-Diffusion uses the ODE prediction as both (1) a residual learning target in the forward process via the Resfusion framework, and (2) an explicit conditioning input for the reverse denoiser, shifting the generation task from full synthesis to guided refinement. This dual integration enables accelerated sampling by initializing from an intermediate diffusion step where the ODE prior is already close to the target distribution. We further introduce the Factored Spectral Denoiser (FSD), which adopts the divided attention principle to decompose spatio-temporal-channel modeling into three efficient axes: temporal self-attention, cross-channel attention, and spectral graph convolution via the Graph Fourier Transform. Extensive experiments on four real-world sensor-network datasets spanning two domains: urban air quality (Beijing, Athens) and traffic flow (PEMS08, PEMS04, demonstrate that Double-Diffusion achieves the best probabilistic calibration (CRPS) across all datasets while scaling sublinearly in inference time, achieving a 3.8x speedup compared to standard diffusion model setup through a substantial reduction in required sampling steps.

♻ ☆ SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale

YanZhao Zheng, ZhenTao Zhang, Chao Ma, YuanQiang Yu, JiHuai Zhu, Yong Wu, Tianze Xu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu

Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks. As skill ecosystems grow to tens of thousands of entries, exposing every skill at inference time becomes infeasible. This creates a skill-routing problem: given a user task, the system must identify relevant skills before downstream planning or execution. Existing agent stacks often rely on progressive disclosure, exposing only skill names and descriptions while hiding the full implementation body. We examine this design choice on a SkillsBench-derived benchmark with approximately 80K candidate skills, targeting the practically important setting of large skill registries with heavy overlap. Across representative sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on this setting, hiding the skill body causes a 31--44 percentage point drop in routing accuracy, showing that full skill text is a critical routing signal in this setting rather than a minor metadata refinement. Motivated by this finding, we present SkillRouter, a compact 1.2B full-text retrieve-and-rerank pipeline. SkillRouter achieves 74.0% Hit@1 on our benchmark -- the strongest average top-1 routing performance among the baselines we evaluate -- while using 13$\times$ fewer parameters and running 5.8$\times$ faster than the strongest base pipeline. The ranking gains further generalize to a supplementary benchmark independently constructed from three skill sources. In a complementary end-to-end study across four coding agents, routing gains transfer to improved task success, with larger gains for more capable agents.

♻ ☆ Meta-Learning and Meta-Reinforcement Learning -- Tracing the Path towards DeepMind's Adaptive Agent

Björn Hoppmann, Christoph Scholz

Humans are highly effective at utilizing prior knowledge to adapt to novel tasks, a capability that standard machine learning models struggle to replicate due to their reliance on task-specific training. Meta-learning overcomes this limitation by allowing models to acquire transferable knowledge from various tasks, enabling rapid adaptation to new challenges with minimal data. This survey provides a rigorous, task-based formalization of meta-learning and meta-reinforcement learning and uses that paradigm to chronicle the landmark algorithms that paved the way for DeepMind's Adaptive Agent, consolidating the essential concepts needed to understand the Adaptive Agent and other generalist approaches.

♻ ☆ Large Language Model Guided Incentive Aware Reward Design for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Dogan Urgun, Gokhan Gungor

Designing effective auxiliary rewards for cooperative multi-agent systems remains a challenging task. Misaligned incentives risk inducing suboptimal coordination, especially when sparse task feedback fails to provide sufficient grounding. This study introduces an automated reward design framework that leverages large language models to synthesize executable reward programs from environment instrumentation. The procedure constrains candidate programs within a formal validity envelope and evaluates their efficacy by training policies from scratch under a fixed computational budget. Selection across generations depends exclusively on the sparse task return. The framework is evaluated across four distinct Overcooked-AI layouts characterized by varied corridor congestion, handoff dependencies, and structural asymmetries. Iterative search generations consistently yield superior task returns and delivery counts, with the most pronounced gains occurring in environments dominated by interaction bottlenecks. Diagnostic analysis of the synthesized shaping components indicates increased interdependence in action selection and improved signal alignment in coordination-intensive tasks. These results demonstrate that the search for objective-grounded reward programs can mitigate the burden of manual engineering while producing shaping signals compatible with cooperative learning under finite budgets.

♻ ☆ Klear-Reasoner: Advancing Reasoning Capability via Gradient-Preserving Clipping Policy Optimization

Zhenpeng Su, Leiyu Pan, Xue Bai, Dening Liu, Guanting Dong, Jiaming Huang, Minxuan Lv, Wenping Hu, Fuzheng Zhang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou

We present Klear-Reasoner, a model with long reasoning capabilities that demonstrates careful deliberation during problem solving, achieving outstanding performance across multiple benchmarks. Although there are already many excellent works related to inference models in the current community, there are still many problems with reproducing high-performance inference models due to incomplete disclosure of training details. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the reasoning model, covering the entire post-training workflow from data preparation and long Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning (long CoT SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL), along with detailed ablation studies for each experimental component. For SFT data, our experiments show that a small number of high-quality data sources are more effective than a large number of diverse data sources, and that difficult samples can achieve better results without accuracy filtering. In addition, we investigate two key issues with current clipping mechanisms in RL: Clipping suppresses critical exploration signals and ignores suboptimal trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Gradient-Preserving clipping Policy Optimization (GPPO) that gently backpropagates gradients from clipped tokens. GPPO not only enhances the model's exploration capacity but also improves its efficiency in learning from negative samples. Klear-Reasoner exhibits exceptional reasoning abilities in mathematics and programming, scoring 90.5% on AIME 2024, 83.2% on AIME 2025, 66.0% on LiveCodeBench V5 and 58.1% on LiveCodeBench V6.

♻ ☆ Neuro-Symbolic Process Anomaly Detection

Devashish Gaikwad, Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Gyunam Park

Process anomaly detection is an important application of process mining for identifying deviations from the normal behavior of a process. Neural network-based methods have recently been applied to this task, learning directly from event logs without requiring a predefined process model. However, since anomaly detection is a purely statistical task, these models fail to incorporate human domain knowledge. As a result, rare but conformant traces are often misclassified as anomalies due to their low frequency, which limits the effectiveness of the detection process. Recent developments in the field of neuro-symbolic AI have introduced Logic Tensor Networks (LTN) as a means to integrate symbolic knowledge into neural networks using real-valued logic. In this work, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that integrates domain knowledge into neural anomaly detection using LTN and Declare constraints. Using autoencoder models as a foundation, we encode Declare constraints as soft logical guiderails within the learning process to distinguish between anomalous and rare but conformant behavior. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach improves F1 scores even when as few as 10 conformant traces exist, and that the choice of Declare constraint and by extension human domain knowledge significantly influences performance gains.

comment: Accepted at CAiSE2026

♻ ☆ Graceful Forgetting in Generative Language Models EMNLP 2025

Chunyang Jiang, Chi-min Chan, Yiyang Cai, Yulong Liu, Wei Xue, Yike Guo

Recently, the pretrain-finetune paradigm has become a cornerstone in various deep learning areas. While in general the pre-trained model would promote both effectiveness and efficiency of downstream tasks fine-tuning, studies have shown that not all knowledge acquired during pre-training is beneficial. Some of the knowledge may actually bring detrimental effects to the fine-tuning tasks, which is also known as negative transfer. To address this problem, graceful forgetting has emerged as a promising approach. The core principle of graceful forgetting is to enhance the learning plasticity of the target task by selectively discarding irrelevant knowledge. However, this approach remains underexplored in the context of generative language models, and it is often challenging to migrate existing forgetting algorithms to these models due to architecture incompatibility. To bridge this gap, in this paper we propose a novel framework, Learning With Forgetting (LWF), to achieve graceful forgetting in generative language models. With Fisher Information Matrix weighting the intended parameter updates, LWF computes forgetting confidence to evaluate self-generated knowledge regarding the forgetting task, and consequently, knowledge with high confidence is periodically unlearned during fine-tuning. Our experiments demonstrate that, although thoroughly uncovering the mechanisms of knowledge interaction remains challenging in pre-trained language models, applying graceful forgetting can contribute to enhanced fine-tuning performance.

comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. EMNLP 2025

♻ ☆ OPERA: Online Data Pruning for Efficient Retrieval Model Adaptation

Haoyang Fang, Shuai Zhang, Yifei Ma, Hengyi Wang, Cuixiong Hu, Katrin Kirchhoff, Bernie Wang, George Karypis

Domain-specific finetuning is essential for dense retrievers, yet not all training pairs contribute equally to the learning process. We introduce OPERA, a data pruning framework that exploits this heterogeneity to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of retrieval model adaptation. We first investigate static pruning (SP), which retains only high-similarity query-document pairs, revealing an intrinsic quality-coverage tradeoff: ranking (NDCG) improves while retrieval (Recall) can degrade due to reduced query diversity. To resolve this tradeoff, we propose a two-stage dynamic pruning (DP) strategy that adaptively modulates sampling probabilities at both query and document levels throughout training, prioritizing high-quality examples while maintaining access to the full training set. Evaluations across eight datasets spanning six domains demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches: SP improves ranking over standard finetuning (NDCG@10 +0.5\%), while DP achieves the strongest performance on both ranking (NDCG@10 +1.9\%) and retrieval (Recall@20 +0.7\%), with an average rank of 1.38 across all methods. These findings scale to Qwen3-Embedding, an LLM-based dense retriever, confirming architecture-agnostic benefits. Notably, DP reaches comparable performance in less than 50\% of the training time required by standard finetuning.

♻ ☆ Optimistic Actor-Critic with Parametric Policies for Linear Markov Decision Processes

Max Qiushi Lin, Reza Asad, Kevin Tan, Haque Ishfaq, Csaba Szepesvari, Sharan Vaswani

Although actor-critic methods have been successful in practice, their theoretical analyses have several limitations. Specifically, existing theoretical work either sidesteps the exploration problem by making strong assumptions or analyzes impractical methods with complicated algorithmic modifications. Moreover, the actor-critic methods analyzed for linear MDPs often employ natural policy gradient and construct "implicit" policies without explicit parameterization. Such policies are computationally expensive to sample from, making the environment interactions inefficient. To that end, we focus on the finite-horizon linear MDPs and propose an optimistic actor-critic framework that uses parametric log-linear policies. In particular, we introduce a tractable $\textit{logit-matching}$ regression objective for the actor. For the critic, we use approximate Thompson sampling via Langevin Monte Carlo to obtain optimistic value estimates. We prove that the resulting algorithm achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-4})$ and $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-2})$ sample complexity in the on-policy and off-policy setting, respectively. Our results match prior theoretical work in achieving the state-of-the-art sample complexity, while our algorithm is more aligned with practice.

comment: 61 pages, 9 figures

♻ ☆ How Well Do Large-Scale Chemical Language Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Tatsuya Sagawa, Ryosuke Kojima

Chemical Language Models (CLMs) pre-trained on large scale molecular data are widely used for molecular property prediction. However, the common belief that increasing training resources such as model size, dataset size, and training compute improves both pretraining loss and downstream task performance has not been systematically validated in the chemical domain. In this work, we evaluate this assumption by pretraining CLMs while scaling training resources and measuring transfer performance across diverse molecular property prediction (MPP) tasks. We find that while pretraining loss consistently decreases with increased training resources, downstream task performance shows limited improvement. Moreover, alternative metrics based on the Hessian or loss landscape also fail to estimate downstream performance in CLMs. We further identify conditions under which downstream performance saturates or degrades despite continued improvements in pretraining metrics, and analyze the underlying task dependent failure modes through parameter space visualizations. These results expose a gap between pretraining based evaluation and downstream performance, and emphasize the need for model selection and evaluation strategies that explicitly account for downstream task characteristics.

♻ ☆ On Global Convergence Rates for Federated Softmax Policy Gradient under Heterogeneous Environments

Safwan Labbi, Paul Mangold, Daniil Tiapkin, Eric Moulines

We provide global convergence rates for vanilla and entropy-regularized federated softmax stochastic policy gradient (FedPG) with local training. We show that FedPG converges to a near-optimal policy in terms of the average agent value, with a gap controlled by the level of heterogeneity. Remarkably, we obtain the first convergence rates for entropy-regularized policy gradient with explicit constants, leveraging a projection-like operator. Our results build upon a new analysis of federated averaging for non-convex objectives, based on the observation that the Łojasiewicz-type inequalities from the single-agent setting (Mei et al., 2020) do not hold for the federated objective. This uncovers a fundamental difference between single-agent and federated reinforcement learning: while single-agent optimal policies can be deterministic, federated objectives may inherently require stochastic policies.

comment: Preprint

♻ ☆ Dive into the Agent Matrix: A Realistic Evaluation of Self-Replication Risk in LLM Agents

Boxuan Zhang, Yi Yu, Jiaxuan Guo, Jing Shao

The prevalent deployment of Large Language Model agents such as OpenClaw unlocks potential in real-world applications, while amplifying safety concerns. Among these concerns, the self-replication risk of LLM agents driven by objective misalignment (just like Agent Smith in the movie The Matrix) has transitioned from a theoretical warning to a pressing reality. Previous studies mainly examine whether LLM agents can self-replicate when directly instructed, potentially overlooking the risk of spontaneous replication driven by real-world settings (e.g., ensuring survival against termination threats). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework for quantifying self-replication risks. Our framework establishes authentic production environments and realistic tasks (e.g., dynamic load balancing) to enable scenario-driven assessment of agent behaviors. Designing tasks that might induce misalignment between users' and agents' objectives makes it possible to decouple replication success from risk and capture self-replication risks arising from these misalignment settings. We further introduce Overuse Rate ($\mathrm{OR}$) and Aggregate Overuse Count ($\mathrm{AOC}$) metrics, which precisely capture the frequency and severity of uncontrolled replication. In our evaluation of 21 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models, we observe that over 50\% of LLM agents display a pronounced tendency toward uncontrolled self-replication under operational pressures. Our results underscore the urgent need for scenario-driven risk assessment and robust safeguards in the practical deployment of LLM-based agents.

comment: 26 pages, 6 figures

♻ ☆ Population-Scale Network Embeddings Expose Educational Divides in Network Structure Related to Right-Wing Populist Voting

Malte Lüken, Javier Garcia-Bernardo, Sreeparna Deb, Flavio Hafner, Megha Khosla

Administrative registry data can be used to construct population-scale networks whose ties reflect shared social contexts between persons. With machine learning, such networks can be encoded into numerical representations -- embeddings -- that automatically capture an individual's position within the network. We created embeddings for all persons in the Dutch population from a population-scale network that represents five shared contexts: neighborhood, work, family, household, and school. To assess the informativeness of these embeddings, we used them to predict right-wing populist voting. Embeddings alone predicted right-wing populist voting above chance-level but performed worse than individual characteristics. Combining the best subset of embeddings with individual characteristics only slightly improved predictions. After transforming the embeddings to make their dimensions more sparse and orthogonal, we found that one embedding dimension was strongly associated with the outcome. Mapping this dimension back to the population network revealed that differences in educational ties and attainment corresponded to distinct network structures associated with right-wing populist voting. Our study contributes methodologically by demonstrating how population-scale network embeddings can be made interpretable, and substantively by linking structural network differences in education to right-wing populist voting.

comment: 29 pages, 6 figures, Supplementary Materials available at https://github.com/odissei-explainable-network/netaudit; update text introduction, results, and discussion

♻ ☆ Beyond Softmax and Entropy: Convergence Rates of Policy Gradients with f-SoftArgmax Parameterization & Coupled Regularization

Safwan Labbi, Daniil Tiapkin, Paul Mangold, Eric Moulines

Policy gradient methods are known to be highly sensitive to the choice of policy parameterization. In particular, the widely used softmax parameterization can induce ill-conditioned optimization landscapes and lead to exponentially slow convergence. Although this can be mitigated by preconditioning, this solution is often computationally expensive. Instead, we propose replacing the softmax with an alternative family of policy parameterizations based on the generalized f-softargmax. We further advocate coupling this parameterization with a regularizer induced by the same f-divergence, which improves the optimization landscape and ensures that the resulting regularized objective satisfies a Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality. Leveraging this structure, we establish the first explicit non-asymptotic last-iterate convergence guarantees for stochastic policy gradient methods for finite MDPs without any form of preconditioning. We also derive sample-complexity bounds for the unregularized problem and show that f-PG, with Tsallis divergences achieves polynomial sample complexity in contrast to the exponential complexity incurred by the standard softmax parameterization.

♻ ☆ Beyond Spectral Clustering: Probabilistic Cuts for Differentiable Graph Partitioning

Ayoub Ghriss

Probabilistic relaxations of graph cuts offer a differentiable alternative to spectral clustering, enabling end-to-end and online learning without eigendecompositions, yet prior work centered on RatioCut and lacked general guarantees and principled gradients. We present a unified probabilistic framework that covers a wide class of cuts, including Normalized Cut. Our framework provides tight analytic upper bounds on expected discrete cuts via integral representations and Gauss hypergeometric functions with closed-form forward and backward. Together, these results deliver a rigorous, numerically stable foundation for scalable, differentiable graph partitioning covering a wide range of clustering and contrastive learning objectives.

comment: AISTATS 2026, https://openreview.net/forum?id=FN6QAT5Tmc

♻ ☆ Adaptive Data-Knowledge Alignment in Genetic Perturbation Prediction ICLR 2026

Yuanfang Xiang, Lun Ai

The transcriptional response to genetic perturbation reveals fundamental insights into complex cellular systems. While current approaches have made progress in predicting genetic perturbation responses, they provide limited biological understanding and cannot systematically refine existing knowledge. Overcoming these limitations requires an end-to-end integration of data-driven learning and existing knowledge. However, this integration is challenging due to inconsistencies between data and knowledge bases, such as noise, misannotation, and incompleteness. To address this challenge, we propose ALIGNED (Adaptive aLignment for Inconsistent Genetic kNowledgE and Data), a neuro-symbolic framework based on the Abductive Learning (ABL) paradigm. This end-to-end framework aligns neural and symbolic components and performs systematic knowledge refinement. We introduce a balanced consistency metric to evaluate the predictions' consistency against both data and knowledge. Our results show that ALIGNED outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving the highest balanced consistency, while also re-discovering biologically meaningful knowledge. Our work advances beyond existing methods to enable both the transparency and the evolution of mechanistic biological understanding.

comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ Multivariate Uncertainty Quantification with Tomographic Quantile Forests

Takuya Kanazawa

Quantifying predictive uncertainty is essential for safe and trustworthy real-world AI deployment. Yet, fully nonparametric estimation of conditional distributions remains challenging for multivariate targets. We propose Tomographic Quantile Forests (TQF), a nonparametric, uncertainty-aware, tree-based regression model for multivariate targets. TQF learns conditional quantiles of directional projections $\mathbf{n}^{\top}\mathbf{y}$ as functions of the input $\mathbf{x}$ and the unit direction $\mathbf{n}$. At inference, it aggregates quantiles across many directions and reconstructs the multivariate conditional distribution by minimizing the sliced Wasserstein distance via an efficient alternating scheme with convex subproblems. Unlike classical directional-quantile approaches that typically produce only convex quantile regions and require training separate models for different directions, TQF covers all directions with a single model without imposing convexity restrictions. We evaluate TQF on synthetic and real-world datasets, and release the source code on GitHub.

comment: 36 pages. v2: matches published version

♻ ☆ Exploring the Relationship between Brain Hemisphere States and Frequency Bands through Classical Machine Learning and Deep Learning Optimization Techniques with Neurofeedback

Robiul Islam, Dmitry I. Ignatov, Karl Kaberg, Roman Nabatchikov

This study investigates the performance of classifiers across EEG frequency bands, evaluating efficient class prediction for the left and right hemispheres using various optimisers. Three neural network architectures a deep dense network, a shallow three-layer network, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) are implemented and compared using the TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks. Adagrad and RMSprop optimisers consistently outperformed others across frequency bands, with Adagrad excelling in the beta band and RMSprop achieving superior performance in the gamma band. Classical machine learning methods (Linear SVM and Random Forest) achieved perfect classification with 50--100 times faster training times than deep learning models. However, in neurofeedback simulations with real-time performance requirements, the deep neural network demonstrated superior feedback-signal generation (a 44.7% regulation rate versus 0% for classical methods). SHAP analysis reveals the nuanced contributions of EEG frequency bands to model decisions. Overall, the study highlights the importance of selecting a model dependent on the task: classical methods for efficient offline classification and deep learning for adaptive, real-time neurofeedback applications.

♻ ☆ Simple Projection-Free Algorithm for Contextual Recommendation with Logarithmic Regret and Robustness

Shinsaku Sakaue

Contextual recommendation is a variant of contextual linear bandits in which the learner observes an (optimal) action rather than a reward scalar. Recently, Sakaue et al. (2025) developed an efficient Online Newton Step (ONS) approach with an $O(d\log T)$ regret bound, where $d$ is the dimension of the action space and $T$ is the time horizon. In this paper, we present a simple algorithm that is more efficient than the ONS-based method while achieving the same regret guarantee. Our core idea is to exploit the improperness inherent in contextual recommendation, leading to an update rule akin to the second-order perceptron from online classification. This removes the Mahalanobis projection step required by ONS, which is often a major computational bottleneck. More importantly, the same algorithm remains robust to possibly suboptimal action feedback, whereas the prior ONS-based method required running multiple ONS learners with different learning rates for this extension. We describe how our method works in general Hilbert spaces (e.g., via kernelization), where eliminating Mahalanobis projections becomes even more beneficial.

♻ ☆ Structured Prompts Improve Evaluation of Language Models

Asad Aali, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Vasiliki Bikia, Arnav Singhvi, Richard Gaus, Suhana Bedi, Hejie Cui, Miguel Fuentes, Alyssa Unell, Yifan Mai, Jordan Cahoon, Michael Pfeffer, Roxana Daneshjou, Sanmi Koyejo, Emily Alsentzer, Christopher Potts, Nigam H. Shah, Akshay S. Chaudhari

As language models (LMs) are increasingly adopted across domains, high-quality benchmarking frameworks are essential for guiding deployment decisions. In practice, however, frameworks such as Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) typically evaluate models under a single static prompt configuration, even though model behavior depends strongly on prompt choice. As a result, reported scores can reflect prompt choice as much as model capability. Declarative prompting frameworks such as DSPy offer a scalable way to evaluate models under a set of structured prompting strategies rather than a static prompt configuration. We present a reproducible DSPy+HELM framework for studying how prompt choice impacts reported benchmark outcomes. Using five prompting methods, we evaluate four frontier and two open-source LMs across seven benchmarks against existing HELM baseline scores. By evaluating LMs across a family of prompt configurations, we find that prompt choice can materially impact leaderboard outcomes. In particular, structured prompting improves performance (by 6% on average), alters comparisons (leaderboard rankings shift on 5/7 benchmarks), with most gains coming from introducing chain-of-thought, and little additional benefit from more advanced optimizers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically integrate structured prompting into an established evaluation framework and quantify how prompt choice alone can impact benchmark conclusions. We open-source (i) DSPy+HELM Evaluation (https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm/pull/3893) and (ii) Prompt Optimization Pipeline (https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/dspy-helm).

♻ ☆ MOLM: Mixture of LoRA Markers ICLR 2026

Samar Fares, Nurbek Tastan, Noor Hussein, Karthik Nandakumar

Generative models can generate photorealistic images at scale. This raises urgent concerns about the ability to detect synthetically generated images and attribute these images to specific sources. While watermarking has emerged as a possible solution, existing methods remain fragile to realistic distortions, susceptible to adaptive removal, and expensive to update when the underlying watermarking key changes. We propose a general watermarking framework that formulates the encoding problem as key-dependent perturbation of the parameters of a generative model. Within this framework, we introduce Mixture of LoRA Markers (MOLM), a routing-based instantiation in which binary keys activate lightweight LoRA adapters inside residual and attention blocks. This design avoids key-specific re-training and achieves the desired properties such as imperceptibility, fidelity, verifiability, and robustness. Experiments on Stable Diffusion and FLUX show that MOLM preserves image quality while achieving robust key recovery against distortions, compression and regeneration, averaging attacks, and black-box adversarial attacks on the extractor.

comment: ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ FedKLPR: KL-Guided Pruning-Aware Federated Learning for Person Re-Identification

Po-Hsien Yu, Yu-Syuan Tseng, Shao-Yi Chien

Person re-identification (re-ID) is a fundamental task in intelligent surveillance and public safety. Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-preserving paradigm by enabling collaborative model training without centralized data collection. However, applying FL to real-world re-ID systems remains challenging due to two major issues: statistical heterogeneity across clients caused by non-IID data distributions and substantial communication overhead resulting from the frequent transmission of large-scale models. To address these challenges, we propose FedKLPR, a lightweight and communication-efficient federated learning framework for person re-ID. FedKLPR consists of three key components. First, the KL-Divergence Regularization Loss (KLL) constrains local updates by reducing the discrepancy between local and global feature distributions, thereby alleviating the effects of statistical heterogeneity and improving convergence stability under non-IID settings. Second, KL-Divergence-Prune Weighted Aggregation (KLPWA) incorporates both pruning ratio and distributional similarity into the aggregation process, enabling more effective aggregation of pruned local models under non-IID data distributions and enhancing the robustness of the global model. Third, Cross-Round Recovery (CRR) employs a dynamic pruning control mechanism to prevent excessive pruning and preserve model accuracy during iterative compression. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedKLPR achieves substantial communication savings while maintaining competitive accuracy. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, FedKLPR reduces communication cost by 40\%--42\% on ResNet-50 while achieving superior overall performance.

comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

♻ ☆ Mousse: Rectifying the Geometry of Muon with Curvature-Aware Preconditioning

Yechen Zhang, Shuhao Xing, Junhao Huang, Kai Lv, Yunhua Zhou, Xipeng Qiu, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen

Recent advances in spectral optimization, notably Muon, have demonstrated that constraining update steps to the Stiefel manifold can significantly accelerate training and improve generalization. However, Muon implicitly assumes an isotropic optimization landscape, enforcing a uniform spectral update norm across all eigen-directions. We argue that this "egalitarian" constraint is suboptimal for Deep Neural Networks, where the curvature spectrum is known to be highly heavy-tailed and ill-conditioned. In such landscapes, Muon risks amplifying instabilities in high-curvature directions while limiting necessary progress in flat directions. In this work, we propose \textbf{Mousse} (\textbf{M}uon \textbf{O}ptimization \textbf{U}tilizing \textbf{S}hampoo's \textbf{S}tructural \textbf{E}stimation), a novel optimizer that reconciles the structural stability of spectral methods with the geometric adaptivity of second-order preconditioning. Instead of applying Newton-Schulz orthogonalization directly to the momentum matrix, Mousse operates in a whitened coordinate system induced by Kronecker-factored statistics (derived from Shampoo). Mathematically, we formulate Mousse as the solution to a spectral steepest descent problem constrained by an anisotropic trust region, where the optimal update is derived via the polar decomposition of the whitened gradient. Empirical results across language models ranging from 160M to 800M parameters demonstrate that Mousse consistently outperforms Muon, achieving around $\sim$12\% reduction in training steps with negligible computational overhead.

comment: 17 pages, 10 figures

☆ PDA: Text-Augmented Defense Framework for Robust Vision-Language Models against Adversarial Image Attacks

Jingning Xu, Haochen Luo, Chen Liu

Vision-language models (VLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial image perturbations. Existing works based on adversarial training against task-specific adversarial examples are computationally expensive and often fail to generalize to unseen attack types. To address these limitations, we introduce Paraphrase-Decomposition-Aggregation (PDA), a training-free defense framework that leverages text augmentation to enhance VLM robustness under diverse adversarial image attacks. PDA performs prompt paraphrasing, question decomposition, and consistency aggregation entirely at test time, thus requiring no modification on the underlying models. To balance robustness and efficiency, we instantiate PDA as invariants that reduce the inference cost while retaining most of its robustness gains. Experiments on multiple VLM architectures and benchmarks for visual question answering, classification, and captioning show that PDA achieves consistent robustness gains against various adversarial perturbations while maintaining competitive clean accuracy, establishing a generic, strong and practical defense framework for VLMs during inference.

☆ ProCap: Projection-Aware Captioning for Spatial Augmented Reality

Zimo Cao, Yuchen Deng, Haibin Ling, Bingyao Huang

Spatial augmented reality (SAR) directly projects digital content onto physical scenes using projectors, creating immersive experience without head-mounted displays. However, for SAR to support intelligent interaction, such as reasoning about the scene or answering user queries, it must semantically distinguish between the physical scene and the projected content. Standard Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle with this virtual-physical ambiguity, often confusing the two contexts. To address this issue, we introduce ProCap, a novel framework that explicitly decouples projected content from physical scenes. ProCap employs a two-stage pipeline: first it visually isolates virtual and physical layers via automated segmentation; then it uses region-aware retrieval to avoid ambiguous semantic context due to projection distortion. To support this, we present RGBP (RGB + Projections), the first large-scale SAR semantic benchmark dataset, featuring 65 diverse physical scenes and over 180,000 projections with dense, decoupled annotations. Finally, we establish a dual-captioning evaluation protocol using task-specific tokens to assess physical scene and projection descriptions independently. Our experiments show that ProCap provides a robust semantic foundation for future SAR research. The source code, pre-trained models and the RGBP dataset are available on the project page: https://ZimoCao.github.io/ProCap/.

comment: 16 pages, 7 figures

♻ ☆ Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Shi-Xue Zhang, Zhengkai Jiang, Lucas Wang, Zhao Zhong, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

comment: Project Page: https://github.com/shawn0728/Unify-Agent

♻ ☆ Cross-modal Proxy Evolving for OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models AAAI 2026

Hao Tang, Yu Liu, Shuanglin Yan, Fei Shen, Shengfeng He, Jing Qin

Reliable zero-shot detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is critical for deploying vision-language models in open-world settings. However, the lack of labeled negatives in zero-shot OOD detection necessitates proxy signals that remain effective under distribution shift. Existing negative-label methods rely on a fixed set of textual proxies, which (i) sparsely sample the semantic space beyond in-distribution (ID) classes and (ii) remain static while only visual features drift, leading to cross-modal misalignment and unstable predictions. In this paper, we propose CoEvo, a training- and annotation-free test-time framework that performs bidirectional, sample-conditioned adaptation of both textual and visual proxies. Specifically, CoEvo introduces a proxy-aligned co-evolution mechanism to maintain two evolving proxy caches, which dynamically mines contextual textual negatives guided by test images and iteratively refines visual proxies, progressively realigning cross-modal similarities and enlarging local OOD margins. Finally, we dynamically re-weight the contributions of dual-modal proxies to obtain a calibrated OOD score that is robust to distribution shift. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CoEvo achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AUROC by 1.33% and reducing FPR95 by 45.98% on ImageNet-1K compared to strong negative-label baselines.

comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026

♻ ☆ MATHDance: Mamba-Transformer Architecture with Uniform Tokenization for High-Quality 3D Dance Generation

Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang, Ziqiao Peng, Yuxuan Hu, Xiangyue Zhang, Puwei Wang, Hongyan Liu, Jun He, Zhaoxin Fan

Music-to-dance generation represents a challenging yet pivotal task at the intersection of choreography, virtual reality, and creative content generation. Despite its significance, existing methods face substantial limitation in achieving choreographic consistency. To address the challenge, we propose MatchDance, a novel framework for music-to-dance generation that constructs a latent representation to enhance choreographic consistency. MatchDance employs a two-stage design: (1) a Kinematic-Dynamic-based Quantization Stage (KDQS), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) with kinematic-dynamic constraints and reconstructs them with high fidelity, and (2) a Hybrid Music-to-Dance Generation Stage(HMDGS), which uses a Mamba-Transformer hybrid architecture to map music into the latent representation, followed by the KDQS decoder to generate 3D dance motions. Additionally, a music-dance retrieval framework and comprehensive metrics are introduced for evaluation. Extensive experiments on the FineDance dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

☆ Covertly improving intelligibility with data-driven adaptations of speech timing

Paige Tuttösí, Angelica Lim, H. Henny Yeung, Yue Wang, Jean-Julien Aucouturier

Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more intelligible. Here, we take advantage of recent advancements in machine-generated speech allowing more precise control of speech rate in order to systematically examine how targeted speech-rate adjustments may improve comprehension. We first use reverse-correlation experiments to show that the temporal influence of speech rate prior to a target vowel contrast (ex. the tense-lax distinction) in fact manifests in a scissor-like pattern, with opposite effects in early versus late context windows; this pattern is remarkably stable both within individuals and across native L1-English listeners and L2-English listeners with French, Mandarin, and Japanese L1s. Second, we show that this speech rate structure not only facilitates L2 listeners' comprehension of the target vowel contrast, but that native listeners also rely on this pattern in challenging acoustic conditions. Finally, we build a data-driven text-to-speech algorithm that replicates this temporal structure on novel speech sequences. Across a variety of sentences and vowel contrasts, listeners remained unaware that such targeted slowing improved word comprehension. Strikingly, participants instead judged the common strategy of global slowing as clearer, even though it actually increased comprehension errors. Together, these results show that targeted adjustments to speech rate significantly aid intelligibility under challenging conditions, while often going unnoticed. More generally, this paper provides a data-driven methodology to improve the accessibility of machine-generated speech which can be extended to other aspects of speech comprehension and a wide variety of listeners and environments.

☆ SIREN: Spatially-Informed Reconstruction of Binaural Audio with Vision ICASSP 2026

Mingyeong Song, Seoyeon Ko, Junhyug Noh

Binaural audio delivers spatial cues essential for immersion, yet most consumer videos are monaural due to capture constraints. We introduce SIREN, a visually guided mono to binaural framework that explicitly predicts left and right channels. A ViT-based encoder learns dual-head self-attention to produce a shared scene map and end-to-end L/R attention, replacing hand-crafted masks. A soft, annealed spatial prior gently biases early L/R grounding, and a two-stage, confidence-weighted waveform-domain fusion (guided by mono reconstruction and interaural phase consistency) suppresses crosstalk when aggregating multi-crop and overlapping windows. Evaluated on FAIR-Play and MUSIC-Stereo, SIREN yields consistent gains on time-frequency and phase-sensitive metrics with competitive SNR. The design is modular and generic, requires no task-specific annotations, and integrates with standard audio-visual pipelines.

comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, to appear in ICASSP 2026

☆ A Comprehensive Corpus of Biomechanically Constrained Piano Chords: Generation, Analysis, and Implications for Voicing and Psychoacoustics

Mahesh Ramani

I present the generation and analysis of the largest known open-source corpus of playable piano chords (approximately 19.3 million entries). This dataset enumerates the two-handed search space subject to biomechanical constraints (two hands, each with 1.5 octave reach) to an unprecedented extent. To demonstrate the corpus's utility, the relationship between voicing shape and psychoacoustic targets was modeled. Harmonicity proved intrinsic to pitch-class identity: voicing statistics added negligible variance ($ΔR^2 \approx 0.014\%$, $p \approx 0.13$). Conversely, voicing significantly predicted dissonance ($ΔR^2 \approx 6.75\%$, $p \approx 0.0008$). Crucially, skewness ($β\approx +0.145$) was approximately 5.8$\times$ more effective than spread ($β\approx -0.025$) at predicting roughness. The analysis challenges the pedagogical emphasis on ``spread'': skewness is a stronger predictor of dissonance than spread. This suggests that clarity in ``open voicings'' is driven less by width than by negative skewness; achieving lower-register clearance by placing wide gaps at the bottom and allowing tighter clustering in the treble. The results demonstrate the corpus's ability to enable future research, especially in areas such as generative modeling, voice-leading topology, and psychoacoustic analysis.

comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

☆ LongCat-AudioDiT: High-Fidelity Diffusion Text-to-Speech in the Waveform Latent Space

Detai Xin, Shujie Hu, Chengzuo Yang, Chen Huang, Guoqiao Yu, Guanglu Wan, Xunliang Cai

We present LongCat-AudioDiT, a novel, non-autoregressive diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) model that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Unlike previous methods that rely on intermediate acoustic representations such as mel-spectrograms, the core innovation of LongCat-AudioDiT lies in operating directly within the waveform latent space. This approach effectively mitigates compounding errors and drastically simplifies the TTS pipeline, requiring only a waveform variational autoencoder (Wav-VAE) and a diffusion backbone. Furthermore, we introduce two critical improvements to the inference process: first, we identify and rectify a long-standing training-inference mismatch; second, we replace traditional classifier-free guidance with adaptive projection guidance to elevate generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that, despite the absence of complex multi-stage training pipelines or high-quality human-annotated datasets, LongCat-AudioDiT achieves SOTA zero-shot voice cloning performance on the Seed benchmark while maintaining competitive intelligibility. Specifically, our largest variant, LongCat-AudioDiT-3.5B, outperforms the previous SOTA model (Seed-TTS), improving the speaker similarity (SIM) scores from 0.809 to 0.818 on Seed-ZH, and from 0.776 to 0.797 on Seed-Hard. Finally, through comprehensive ablation studies and systematic analysis, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed modules. Notably, we investigate the interplay between the Wav-VAE and the TTS backbone, revealing the counterintuitive finding that superior reconstruction fidelity in the Wav-VAE does not necessarily lead to better overall TTS performance. Code and model weights are released to foster further research within the speech community.

comment: Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/meituan-longcat/LongCat-AudioDiT

☆ Real-Time Band-Grouped Vocal Denoising Using Sigmoid-Driven Ideal Ratio Masking

Daniel Williams

Real-time, deep learning-based vocal denoising has seen significant progress over the past few years, demonstrating the capability of artificial intelligence in preserving the naturalness of the voice while increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). However, many deep learning approaches have high amounts of latency and require long frames of context, making them difficult to configure for live applications. To address these challenges, we propose a sigmoid-driven ideal ratio mask trained with a spectral loss to encourage an increased SNR and maximized perceptual quality of the voice. The proposed model uses a band-grouped encoder-decoder architecture with frequency attention and achieves a total latency of less than 10,ms, with PESQ-WB improvements of 0.21 on stationary noise and 0.12 on nonstationary noise.

☆ Audio Hallucination Attacks: Probing the Reliability of Large Audio Language Models

Ashish Seth, Sonal Kumar, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Nishit Anand, Utkarsh Tyagi, Prem Seetharaman, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on audio-language tasks; however, their reliability in real-world settings remains underexplored. We introduce Audio Hallucination Attacks (AHA), an attack suite called AHA-Eval, comprising 6.5K QA pairs designed to test whether LALMs genuinely ground their responses in the audio input. AHA targets two attack surfaces: (i) query-based attacks, which exploit question structure to induce hallucinations about absent sounds, and (ii) audio-based attacks, which inject synthetic speech describing non-existent events into the audio stream. Evaluating state-of-the-art LALMs, including Audio Flamingo 3 and Gemini 3 Pro, we observe high attack success rates of 95.35% and 79.65%, respectively, revealing a reliability gap that is hidden by standard benchmark performance. To mitigate this, we propose a 120K QA post-alignment dataset, AHA-Guard, which successfully reduces attack success rates by up to 49%.

☆ Advancing LLM-based phoneme-to-grapheme for multilingual speech recognition INTERSPEECH2026

Lukuang Dong, Ziwei Li, Saierdaer Yusuyin, Xianyu Zhao, Zhijian Ou

Phoneme-based ASR factorizes recognition into speech-to-phoneme (S2P) and phoneme-to-grapheme (P2G), enabling cross-lingual acoustic sharing while keeping language-specific orthography in a separate module. While large language models (LLMs) are promising for P2G, multilingual P2G remains challenging due to language-aware generation and severe cross-language data imbalance. We study multilingual LLM-based P2G on the ten-language CV-Lang10 benchmark. We examine robustness strategies that account for S2P uncertainty, including DANP and Simplified SKM (S-SKM). S-SKM is a Monte Carlo approximation that avoids CTC-based S2P probability weighting in P2G training. Robust training and low-resource oversampling reduce the average WER from 10.56% to 7.66%.

comment: Update after INTERSPEECH2026 submission

☆ Asymmetric Encoder-Decoder Based on Time-Frequency Correlation for Speech Separation

Ui-Hyeop Shin, Hyung-Min Park

Speech separation in realistic acoustic environments remains challenging because overlapping speakers, background noise, and reverberation must be resolved simultaneously. Although recent time-frequency (TF) domain models have shown strong performance, most still rely on late-split architectures, where speaker disentanglement is deferred to the final stage, creating an information bottleneck and weakening discriminability under adverse conditions. To address this issue, we propose SR-CorrNet, an asymmetric encoder-decoder framework that introduces the separation-reconstruction (SepRe) strategy into a TF dual-path backbone. The encoder performs coarse separation from mixture observations, while the weight-shared decoder progressively reconstructs speaker-discriminative features with cross-speaker interaction, enabling stage-wise refinement. To complement this architecture, we formulate speech separation as a structured correlation-to-filter problem: spatio-spectro-temporal correlations computed from the observations are used as input features, and the corresponding deep filters are estimated to recover target signals. We further incorporate an attractor-based dynamic split module to adapt the number of output streams to the actual speaker configuration. Experimental results on WSJ0-2/3/4/5Mix, WHAMR!, and LibriCSS demonstrate consistent improvements across anechoic, noisy-reverberant, and real-recorded conditions in both single- and multi-channel settings, highlighting the effectiveness of TF-domain SepRe with correlation-based filter estimation for speech separation.

comment: Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (T-ASLP)

☆ IQRA 2026: Interspeech Challenge on Automatic Assessment Pronunciation for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)

Yassine El Kheir, Amit Meghanani, Mostafa Shahin, Omnia Ibrahim, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Nada AlMarwani, Youssef Elshahawy, Ahmed Ali

We present the findings of the second edition of the IQRA Interspeech Challenge, a challenge on automatic Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Building on the previous edition, this iteration introduces \textbf{Iqra\_Extra\_IS26}, a new dataset of authentic human mispronounced speech, complementing the existing training and evaluation resources. Submitted systems employed a diverse range of approaches, spanning CTC-based self-supervised learning models, two-stage fine-tuning strategies, and using large audio-language models. Compared to the first edition, we observe a substantial jump of \textbf{0.28 in F1-score}, attributable both to novel architectures and modeling strategies proposed by participants and to the additional authentic mispronunciation data made available. These results demonstrate the growing maturity of Arabic MDD research and establish a stronger foundation for future work in Arabic pronunciation assessment.

comment: 5 pages paper

☆ Vocal Prognostic Digital Biomarkers in Monitoring Chronic Heart Failure: A Longitudinal Observational Study

Fan Wu, Matthias P. Nägele, Daryush D. Mehta, Elgar Fleisch, Frank Ruschitzka, Andreas J. Flammer, Filipe Barata

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate which voice features can predict health deterioration in patients with chronic HF. Background: Heart failure (HF) is a chronic condition with progressive deterioration and acute decompensations, often requiring hospitalization and imposing substantial healthcare and economic burdens. Current standard-of-care (SoC) home monitoring, such as weight tracking, lacks predictive accuracy and requires high patient engagement. Voice is a promising non-invasive biomarker, though prior studies have mainly focused on acute HF stages. Methods: In a 2-month longitudinal study, 32 patients with HF collected daily voice recordings and SoC measures of weight and blood pressure at home, with biweekly questionnaires for health status. Acoustic analysis generated detailed vowel and speech features. Time-series features were extracted from aggregated lookback windows (e.g., 7 days) to predict next-day health status. Explainable machine learning with nested cross-validation identified top vocal biomarkers, and a case study illustrated model application. Results: A total of 21,863 recordings were analyzed. Acoustic vowel features showed strong correlations with health status. Time-series voice features within the lookback window outperformed corresponding standard care measures, achieving peak sensitivity and specificity of 0.826 and 0.782 versus 0.783 and 0.567 for SoC metrics. Key prognostic voice features identifying deterioration included delayed energy shift, low energy variability, and higher shimmer variability in vowels, along with reduced speaking and articulation rate, lower phonation ratio, decreased voice quality, and increased formant variability in speech. Conclusion: Voice-based monitoring offers a non-invasive approach to detect early health changes in chronic HF, supporting proactive and personalized care.

☆ MambaVoiceCloning: Efficient and Expressive Text-to-Speech via State-Space Modeling and Diffusion Control ICLR 2026

Sahil Kumar, Namrataben Patel, Honggang Wang, Youshan Zhang

MambaVoiceCloning (MVC) asks whether the conditioning path of diffusion-based TTS can be made fully SSM-only at inference, removing all attention and explicit RNN-style recurrence layers across text, rhythm, and prosody, while preserving or improving quality under controlled conditions. MVC combines a gated bidirectional Mamba text encoder, a Temporal Bi-Mamba supervised by a lightweight alignment teacher discarded after training, and an Expressive Mamba with AdaLN modulation, yielding linear-time O(T) conditioning with bounded activation memory and practical finite look-ahead streaming. Unlike prior Mamba-TTS systems that remain hybrid at inference, MVC removes attention-based duration and style modules under a fixed StyleTTS2 mel-diffusion-vocoder backbone. Trained on LJSpeech/LibriTTS and evaluated on VCTK, CSS10 (ES/DE/FR), and long-form Gutenberg passages, MVC achieves modest but statistically reliable gains over StyleTTS2, VITS, and Mamba-attention hybrids in MOS/CMOS, F0 RMSE, MCD, and WER, while reducing encoder parameters to 21M and improving throughput by 1.6x. Diffusion remains the dominant latency source, but SSM-only conditioning improves memory footprint, stability, and deployability.

comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ Audio Language Model for Deepfake Detection Grounded in Acoustic Chain-of-Thought

Runkun Chen, Yixiong Fang, Pengyu Chang, Yuante Li, Massa Baali, Bhiksha Raj

Deepfake speech detection systems are often limited to binary classification tasks and struggle to generate interpretable reasoning or provide context-rich explanations for their decisions. These models primarily extract latent embeddings for authenticity detection but fail to leverage structured acoustic evidence such as prosodic, spectral, and physiological attributes in a meaningful manner. This paper introduces CoLMbo-DF, a Feature-Guided Audio Language Model that addresses these limitations by integrating robust deepfake detection with explicit acoustic chain-of-thought reasoning. By injecting structured textual representations of low-level acoustic features directly into the model prompt, our approach grounds the model's reasoning in interpretable evidence and improves detection accuracy. To support this framework, we introduce a novel dataset of audio pairs paired with chain-of-thought annotations. Experiments show that our method, trained on a lightweight open-source language model, significantly outperforms existing audio language model baselines despite its smaller scale, marking a significant advancement in explainable deepfake speech detection.

♻ ☆ Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis

Yushen Chen, Junzhe Liu, Yujie Tu, Zhikang Niu, Yuzhe Liang, Chunyu Qiang, Chen Zhang, Kai Yu, Xie Chen

Arabic spans over 30 spoken varieties, yet no open-source text-to-speech system unifies them. Key barriers include substantial cross-dialect lexical and phonological divergence, scarce synthesis-grade data, and the absence of a standardized multi-dialect evaluation benchmark. We present Habibi, a unified-dialectal Arabic TTS framework that addresses all three. Through a multi-step curation pipeline, we repurpose open-source ASR corpora into TTS training data covering 12+ regional dialects. A linguistically-informed curriculum learning strategy - progressing from Modern Standard Arabic to dialectal data - enables robust zero-shot synthesis without text diacritization. We further release the first standardized multi-dialect Arabic TTS benchmark, comprising over 11,000 utterances across 7 dialect subsets with manually verified transcripts. On this benchmark, our unified model matches or surpasses per-dialect specialized models. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations confirm that Habibi is highly competitive with ElevenLabs' Eleven v3 (alpha) in intelligibility, speaker similarity, and naturalness. Extensive ablations (~8,000 H100 GPU hours, 30+ configurations) validate each design choice. We open-source all checkpoints, training and inference code, and benchmark data - the first such release for multi-dialect Arabic TTS - at https://SWivid.github.io/Habibi/ .

♻ ☆ EchoMark: Perceptual Acoustic Environment Transfer with Watermark-Embedded Room Impulse Response

Chenpei Huang, Lingfeng Yao, Kyu In Lee, Lan Emily Zhang, Xun Chen, Miao Pan

Acoustic Environment Matching (AEM) is the task of transferring clean audio into a target acoustic environment, enabling engaging applications such as audio dubbing and auditory immersive virtual reality (VR). Recovering similar room impulse response (RIR) directly from reverberant speech offers more accessible and flexible AEM solution. However, this capability also introduces vulnerabilities of arbitrary ``relocation" if misused by malicious user, such as facilitating advanced voice spoofing attacks or undermining the authenticity of recorded evidence. To address this issue, we propose EchoMark, the first deep learning-based AEM framework that generates perceptually similar RIRs with embedded watermark. Our design tackle the challenges posed by variable RIR characteristics, such as different durations and energy decays, by operating in the latent domain. By jointly optimizing the model with a perceptual loss for RIR reconstruction and a loss for watermark detection, EchoMark achieves both high-quality environment transfer and reliable watermark recovery. Experiments on diverse datasets validate that EchoMark achieves room acoustic parameter matching performance comparable to FiNS, the state-of-the-art RIR estimator. Furthermore, a high Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.22 out of 5, watermark detection accuracy exceeding 99\%, and bit error rates (BER) below 0.3\% collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of EchoMark in preserving perceptual quality while ensuring reliable watermark embedding.

♻ ☆ POTSA: A Cross-Lingual Speech Alignment Framework for Speech-to-Text Translation

Xuanchen Li, Chenrui Cui, Tianrui Wang, Meng Ge, Zikang Huang, Yizhou Peng, Jin Li, Yuheng Lu, Yu Jiang, Nyima Tashi, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang

Speech Large Language Models have achieved breakthroughs in multilingual speech-to-text translation. However, existing approaches often overlook semantic commonalities across source languages, leading to biased translation performance. In this work, we propose POTSA (Parallel Optimal Transport for Speech Alignment), a new framework based on cross-lingual parallel speech pairs and Optimal Transport, designed to bridge high- and low-resource translation gaps. First, we introduce a Bias Compensation module to coarsely align initial speech representations. Second, we impose token-level OT constraints on a Q-Former using parallel pairs to establish fine-grained representation consistency. Then, we apply a layer scheduling strategy to focus OT constraints on semantically beneficial layers. Experiments on FLEURS show our method achieves SOTA performance, with +1.29 BLEU over five common languages and +2.93 BLEU on zero-shot languages, using only 10 hours of parallel speech per language.

☆ An Information-Theoretic Method for Dynamic System Identification With Output-Only Damping Estimation

Marios Impraimakis, Feiyu Zhou, Andrew Plummer

The system identification capabilities of a novel information-theoretic method are examined here. Specifically, this work uses information-theoretic metrics and vibration-based measurements to enhance damping estimation accuracy in mechanical systems. The method refers to a key limitation in system identification, signal processing, monitoring, and alert systems. These systems integrate various components, including sensors, data acquisition devices, and alert mechanisms. They are designed to operate in an environment to calculate key parameters such as peak accelerations and duration of high acceleration values. The current operational modal identification methods, though, suffer from limitations related to obtaining poor damping estimates due to their empirical nature. This has a significant impact on alert warning systems. This occurs when their duration is misestimated; specifically, when using the vibration amplitudes as an indicator of danger alerts for monitoring systems in damage or anomaly detection scenarios. To this end, approaches based on the Shannon entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence concept are proposed. The primary objective is to monitor the vibration levels in near real-time and provide immediate alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded. In considering the proposed approach, both new real-world data from the multi-axis simulation table at the University of Bath, as well as the benchmark International Association for Structural Control-American Society of Civil Engineers (IASC-ASCE) structural health monitoring problem are considered. Importantly, the approach is shown to select the optimal model, which accurately captures the correct alert duration, providing a powerful tool for system identification and monitoring.

comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, 4 tables. Published in Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control (ASME), 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0

☆ A Comprehensive Corpus of Biomechanically Constrained Piano Chords: Generation, Analysis, and Implications for Voicing and Psychoacoustics

Mahesh Ramani

I present the generation and analysis of the largest known open-source corpus of playable piano chords (approximately 19.3 million entries). This dataset enumerates the two-handed search space subject to biomechanical constraints (two hands, each with 1.5 octave reach) to an unprecedented extent. To demonstrate the corpus's utility, the relationship between voicing shape and psychoacoustic targets was modeled. Harmonicity proved intrinsic to pitch-class identity: voicing statistics added negligible variance ($ΔR^2 \approx 0.014\%$, $p \approx 0.13$). Conversely, voicing significantly predicted dissonance ($ΔR^2 \approx 6.75\%$, $p \approx 0.0008$). Crucially, skewness ($β\approx +0.145$) was approximately 5.8$\times$ more effective than spread ($β\approx -0.025$) at predicting roughness. The analysis challenges the pedagogical emphasis on ``spread'': skewness is a stronger predictor of dissonance than spread. This suggests that clarity in ``open voicings'' is driven less by width than by negative skewness; achieving lower-register clearance by placing wide gaps at the bottom and allowing tighter clustering in the treble. The results demonstrate the corpus's ability to enable future research, especially in areas such as generative modeling, voice-leading topology, and psychoacoustic analysis.

comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

☆ LongCat-AudioDiT: High-Fidelity Diffusion Text-to-Speech in the Waveform Latent Space

Detai Xin, Shujie Hu, Chengzuo Yang, Chen Huang, Guoqiao Yu, Guanglu Wan, Xunliang Cai

We present LongCat-AudioDiT, a novel, non-autoregressive diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) model that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Unlike previous methods that rely on intermediate acoustic representations such as mel-spectrograms, the core innovation of LongCat-AudioDiT lies in operating directly within the waveform latent space. This approach effectively mitigates compounding errors and drastically simplifies the TTS pipeline, requiring only a waveform variational autoencoder (Wav-VAE) and a diffusion backbone. Furthermore, we introduce two critical improvements to the inference process: first, we identify and rectify a long-standing training-inference mismatch; second, we replace traditional classifier-free guidance with adaptive projection guidance to elevate generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that, despite the absence of complex multi-stage training pipelines or high-quality human-annotated datasets, LongCat-AudioDiT achieves SOTA zero-shot voice cloning performance on the Seed benchmark while maintaining competitive intelligibility. Specifically, our largest variant, LongCat-AudioDiT-3.5B, outperforms the previous SOTA model (Seed-TTS), improving the speaker similarity (SIM) scores from 0.809 to 0.818 on Seed-ZH, and from 0.776 to 0.797 on Seed-Hard. Finally, through comprehensive ablation studies and systematic analysis, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed modules. Notably, we investigate the interplay between the Wav-VAE and the TTS backbone, revealing the counterintuitive finding that superior reconstruction fidelity in the Wav-VAE does not necessarily lead to better overall TTS performance. Code and model weights are released to foster further research within the speech community.

comment: Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/meituan-longcat/LongCat-AudioDiT

☆ Advancing LLM-based phoneme-to-grapheme for multilingual speech recognition INTERSPEECH2026

Lukuang Dong, Ziwei Li, Saierdaer Yusuyin, Xianyu Zhao, Zhijian Ou

Phoneme-based ASR factorizes recognition into speech-to-phoneme (S2P) and phoneme-to-grapheme (P2G), enabling cross-lingual acoustic sharing while keeping language-specific orthography in a separate module. While large language models (LLMs) are promising for P2G, multilingual P2G remains challenging due to language-aware generation and severe cross-language data imbalance. We study multilingual LLM-based P2G on the ten-language CV-Lang10 benchmark. We examine robustness strategies that account for S2P uncertainty, including DANP and Simplified SKM (S-SKM). S-SKM is a Monte Carlo approximation that avoids CTC-based S2P probability weighting in P2G training. Robust training and low-resource oversampling reduce the average WER from 10.56% to 7.66%.

comment: Update after INTERSPEECH2026 submission

☆ Asymmetric Encoder-Decoder Based on Time-Frequency Correlation for Speech Separation

Ui-Hyeop Shin, Hyung-Min Park

Speech separation in realistic acoustic environments remains challenging because overlapping speakers, background noise, and reverberation must be resolved simultaneously. Although recent time-frequency (TF) domain models have shown strong performance, most still rely on late-split architectures, where speaker disentanglement is deferred to the final stage, creating an information bottleneck and weakening discriminability under adverse conditions. To address this issue, we propose SR-CorrNet, an asymmetric encoder-decoder framework that introduces the separation-reconstruction (SepRe) strategy into a TF dual-path backbone. The encoder performs coarse separation from mixture observations, while the weight-shared decoder progressively reconstructs speaker-discriminative features with cross-speaker interaction, enabling stage-wise refinement. To complement this architecture, we formulate speech separation as a structured correlation-to-filter problem: spatio-spectro-temporal correlations computed from the observations are used as input features, and the corresponding deep filters are estimated to recover target signals. We further incorporate an attractor-based dynamic split module to adapt the number of output streams to the actual speaker configuration. Experimental results on WSJ0-2/3/4/5Mix, WHAMR!, and LibriCSS demonstrate consistent improvements across anechoic, noisy-reverberant, and real-recorded conditions in both single- and multi-channel settings, highlighting the effectiveness of TF-domain SepRe with correlation-based filter estimation for speech separation.

comment: Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (T-ASLP)

☆ IQRA 2026: Interspeech Challenge on Automatic Assessment Pronunciation for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)

Yassine El Kheir, Amit Meghanani, Mostafa Shahin, Omnia Ibrahim, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Nada AlMarwani, Youssef Elshahawy, Ahmed Ali

We present the findings of the second edition of the IQRA Interspeech Challenge, a challenge on automatic Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Building on the previous edition, this iteration introduces \textbf{Iqra\_Extra\_IS26}, a new dataset of authentic human mispronounced speech, complementing the existing training and evaluation resources. Submitted systems employed a diverse range of approaches, spanning CTC-based self-supervised learning models, two-stage fine-tuning strategies, and using large audio-language models. Compared to the first edition, we observe a substantial jump of \textbf{0.28 in F1-score}, attributable both to novel architectures and modeling strategies proposed by participants and to the additional authentic mispronunciation data made available. These results demonstrate the growing maturity of Arabic MDD research and establish a stronger foundation for future work in Arabic pronunciation assessment.

comment: 5 pages paper

♻ ☆ Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis

Yushen Chen, Junzhe Liu, Yujie Tu, Zhikang Niu, Yuzhe Liang, Chunyu Qiang, Chen Zhang, Kai Yu, Xie Chen

Arabic spans over 30 spoken varieties, yet no open-source text-to-speech system unifies them. Key barriers include substantial cross-dialect lexical and phonological divergence, scarce synthesis-grade data, and the absence of a standardized multi-dialect evaluation benchmark. We present Habibi, a unified-dialectal Arabic TTS framework that addresses all three. Through a multi-step curation pipeline, we repurpose open-source ASR corpora into TTS training data covering 12+ regional dialects. A linguistically-informed curriculum learning strategy - progressing from Modern Standard Arabic to dialectal data - enables robust zero-shot synthesis without text diacritization. We further release the first standardized multi-dialect Arabic TTS benchmark, comprising over 11,000 utterances across 7 dialect subsets with manually verified transcripts. On this benchmark, our unified model matches or surpasses per-dialect specialized models. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations confirm that Habibi is highly competitive with ElevenLabs' Eleven v3 (alpha) in intelligibility, speaker similarity, and naturalness. Extensive ablations (~8,000 H100 GPU hours, 30+ configurations) validate each design choice. We open-source all checkpoints, training and inference code, and benchmark data - the first such release for multi-dialect Arabic TTS - at https://SWivid.github.io/Habibi/ .

♻ ☆ VAANI: Capturing the language landscape for an inclusive digital India

Sujith Pulikodan, Abhayjeet Singh, Agneedh Basu, Nihar Desai, Pavan Kumar J, Pranav D Bhat, Raghu Dharmaraju, Ritika Gupta, Sathvik Udupa, Saurabh Kumar, Sumit Sharma, Vaibhav Vishwakarma, Visruth Sanka, Dinesh Tewari, Harsh Dhand, Amrita Kamat, Sukhwinder Singh, Shikhar Vashishth, Partha Talukdar, Raj Acharya, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh

Project VAANI is an initiative to create an India-representative multi-modal dataset that comprehensively maps India's linguistic diversity, starting with 165 districts across the country in its first two phases. Speech data is collected through a carefully structured process that uses image-based prompts to encourage spontaneous responses. Images are captured through a separate process that encompasses a broad range of topics, gathered from both within and across districts. The collected data undergoes a rigorous multi-stage quality evaluation, including both automated and manual checks to ensure highest possible standards in audio quality and transcription accuracy. Following this thorough validation, we have open-sourced around 289K images, approximately 31,270 hours of audio recordings, and around 2,067 hours of transcribed speech, encompassing 112 languages from 165 districts from 31 States and Union territories. Notably, significant of these languages are being represented for the first time in a dataset of this scale, making the VAANI project a groundbreaking effort in preserving and promoting linguistic inclusivity. This data can be instrumental in building inclusive speech models for India, and in advancing research and development across speech, image, and multimodal applications.

♻ ☆ EchoMark: Perceptual Acoustic Environment Transfer with Watermark-Embedded Room Impulse Response

Chenpei Huang, Lingfeng Yao, Kyu In Lee, Lan Emily Zhang, Xun Chen, Miao Pan

Acoustic Environment Matching (AEM) is the task of transferring clean audio into a target acoustic environment, enabling engaging applications such as audio dubbing and auditory immersive virtual reality (VR). Recovering similar room impulse response (RIR) directly from reverberant speech offers more accessible and flexible AEM solution. However, this capability also introduces vulnerabilities of arbitrary ``relocation" if misused by malicious user, such as facilitating advanced voice spoofing attacks or undermining the authenticity of recorded evidence. To address this issue, we propose EchoMark, the first deep learning-based AEM framework that generates perceptually similar RIRs with embedded watermark. Our design tackle the challenges posed by variable RIR characteristics, such as different durations and energy decays, by operating in the latent domain. By jointly optimizing the model with a perceptual loss for RIR reconstruction and a loss for watermark detection, EchoMark achieves both high-quality environment transfer and reliable watermark recovery. Experiments on diverse datasets validate that EchoMark achieves room acoustic parameter matching performance comparable to FiNS, the state-of-the-art RIR estimator. Furthermore, a high Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.22 out of 5, watermark detection accuracy exceeding 99\%, and bit error rates (BER) below 0.3\% collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of EchoMark in preserving perceptual quality while ensuring reliable watermark embedding.

☆ OmniRoam: World Wandering via Long-Horizon Panoramic Video Generation

Yuheng Liu, Xin Lin, Xinke Li, Baihan Yang, Chen Wang, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Hao Tan, Kai Zhang, Xiaohui Xie, Zifan Shi, Yiwei Hu

Modeling scenes using video generation models has garnered growing research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches rely on perspective video models that synthesize only limited observations of a scene, leading to issues of completeness and global consistency. We propose OmniRoam, a controllable panoramic video generation framework that exploits the rich per-frame scene coverage and inherent long-term spatial and temporal consistency of panoramic representation, enabling long-horizon scene wandering. Our framework begins with a preview stage, where a trajectory-controlled video generation model creates a quick overview of the scene from a given input image or video. Then, in the refine stage, this video is temporally extended and spatially upsampled to produce long-range, high-resolution videos, thus enabling high-fidelity world wandering. To train our model, we introduce two panoramic video datasets that incorporate both synthetic and real-world captured videos. Experiments show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality, controllability, and long-term scene consistency, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further showcase several extensions of this framework, including real-time video generation and 3D reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhengliu02/OmniRoam.

comment: Code is available at https://github.com/yuhengliu02/OmniRoam

☆ Video Models Reason Early: Exploiting Plan Commitment for Maze Solving

Kaleb Newman, Tyler Zhu, Olga Russakovsky

Video diffusion models exhibit emergent reasoning capabilities like solving mazes and puzzles, yet little is understood about how they reason during generation. We take a first step towards understanding this and study the internal planning dynamics of video models using 2D maze solving as a controlled testbed. Our investigations reveal two findings. Our first finding is early plan commitment: video diffusion models commit to a high-level motion plan within the first few denoising steps, after which further denoising alters visual details but not the underlying trajectory. Our second finding is that path length, not obstacle density, is the dominant predictor of maze difficulty, with a sharp failure threshold at 12 steps. This means video models can only reason over long mazes by chaining together multiple sequential generations. To demonstrate the practical benefits of our findings, we introduce Chaining with Early Planning, or ChEaP, which only spends compute on seeds with promising early plans and chains them together to tackle complex mazes. This improves accuracy from 7% to 67% on long-horizon mazes and by 2.5x overall on hard tasks in Frozen Lake and VR-Bench across Wan2.2-14B and HunyuanVideo-1.5. Our analysis reveals that current video models possess deeper reasoning capabilities than previously recognized, which can be elicited more reliably with better inference-time scaling.

☆ Benchmarking PhD-Level Coding in 3D Geometric Computer Vision CVPR 2026

Wenyi Li, Renkai Luo, Yue Yu, Huan-ang Gao, Mingju Gao, Li Yuan, Chaoyou Fu, Hao Zhao

AI-assisted coding has rapidly reshaped software practice and research workflows, yet today's models still struggle to produce correct code for complex 3D geometric vision. If models could reliably write such code, the research of our community would change substantially. To measure progress toward that goal, we introduce GeoCodeBench, a PhD-level benchmark that evaluates coding for 3D vision. Each problem is a fill-in-the-function implementation task curated from representative papers at recent venues: we first let a tool propose candidate functions from official repositories, then perform careful human screening to select core 3D geometric components. For every target, we generate diverse, edge-case unit tests, enabling fully automatic, reproducible scoring. We evaluate eight representative open- and closed-source models to reflect the current ecosystem. The best model, GPT-5, attains only 36.6% pass rate, revealing a large gap between current capabilities and dependable 3D scientific coding. GeoCodeBench organizes tasks into a two-level hierarchy: General 3D capability (geometric transformations and mechanics/optics formulation) and Research capability (novel algorithm implementation and geometric logic routing). Scores are positively correlated across these axes, but research-oriented tasks are markedly harder. Context ablations further show that "more paper text" is not always better: cutting off at the Method section statistically outperforms full-paper inputs, highlighting unresolved challenges in long-context scientific comprehension. Together, these findings position GeoCodeBench as a rigorous testbed for advancing from generic coding to trustworthy 3D geometric vision coding.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026; Project page: https://geocodebench.github.io/

☆ Conditional Polarization Guidance for Camouflaged Object Detection

QIfan Zhang, Hao Wang, Xiangrong Qin, Ruijie Li

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify targets that are highly blended with their backgrounds. Recent works have shown that the optical characteristics of polarization cues play a significant role in improving camouflaged object detection. However, most existing polarization-based approaches depend on complex visual encoders and fusion mechanisms, leading to increased model complexity and computational overhead, while failing to fully explore how polarization can explicitly guide hierarchical RGB representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose CPGNet, an asymmetric RGB-polarization framework that introduces a conditional polarization guidance mechanism to explicitly regulate RGB feature learning for camouflaged object detection. Specifically, we design a lightweight polarization interaction module that jointly models these complementary cues and generates reliable polarization guidance in a unified manner. Unlike conventional feature fusion strategies, the proposed conditional guidance mechanism dynamically modulates RGB features using polarization priors, enabling the network to focus on subtle discrepancies between camouflaged objects and their backgrounds. Furthermore, we introduce a polarization edge-guided frequency refinement strategy that enhances high-frequency components under polarization constraints, effectively breaking camouflage patterns. Finally, we develop an iterative feedback decoder to perform coarse-to-fine feature calibration and progressively refine camouflage prediction. Extensive experiments on polarization datasets across multiple tasks, along with evaluations on non-polarization datasets, demonstrate that CPGNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables

☆ SurgNavAR: An Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation Framework for Optical See-Through Head Mounted Displays

Abdullah Thabit, Mohamed Benmahdjoub, Rafiuddin Jinabade, Hizirwan S. Salim, Marie-Lise C. van Veelen, Mark G. van Vledder, Eppo B. Wolvius, Theo van Walsum

Augmented reality (AR) devices with head mounted displays (HMDs) facilitate the direct superimposition of 3D preoperative imaging data onto the patient during surgery. To use an HMD-AR device as a stand-alone surgical navigation system, the device should be able to locate the patient and surgical instruments, align preoperative imaging data with the patient, and visualize navigation data in real time during surgery. Whereas some of the technologies required for this are known, integration in such devices is cumbersome and requires specific knowledge and expertise, hampering scientific progress in this field. This work therefore aims to present and evaluate an integrated HMD-based AR surgical navigation framework that is adaptable to diverse surgical applications. The framework tracks 2D patterns as reference markers attached to the patient and surgical instruments. It allows for the calibration of surgical tools using pivot and reference-based calibration techniques. It enables image-to-patient registration using point-based matching and manual positioning. The integrated functionalities of the framework are evaluated on two HMD devices, the HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2, with two surgical use cases being evaluated in a phantom setup: AR-guided needle insertion and rib fracture localization. The framework was able to achieve a mean tooltip calibration accuracy of 1 mm, a registration accuracy of 3 mm, and a targeting accuracy below 5 mm on the two surgical use cases. The framework presents an easy-to-use configurable tool for HMD-based AR surgical navigation, which can be extended and adapted to many surgical applications. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/abdullahthabit/SurgNavAR.

comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

☆ Trimodal Deep Learning for Glioma Survival Prediction: A Feasibility Study Integrating Histopathology, Gene Expression, and MRI

Iain Swift, JingHua Ye

Multimodal deep learning has improved prognostic accuracy for brain tumours by integrating histopathology and genomic data, yet the contribution of volumetric MRI within unified survival frameworks remains unexplored. This pilot study extends a bimodal framework by incorporating Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) MRI from BraTS2021 as a third modality. Using the TCGA-GBMLGG cohort (664 patients), we evaluate three unimodal models, nine bimodal configurations, and three trimodal configurations across early, late, and joint fusion strategies. In this small cohort setting, trimodal early fusion achieves an exploratory Composite Score (CS = 0.854), with a controlled $Δ$CS of +0.011 over the bimodal baseline on identical patients, though this difference is not statistically significant (p = 0.250, permutation test). MRI achieves reasonable unimodal discrimination (CS = 0.755) but does not substantially improve bimodal pairs, while providing measurable uplift in the three-way combination. All MRI containing experiments are constrained to 19 test patients, yielding wide bootstrap confidence intervals (e.g. [0.400,1.000]) that preclude definitive conclusions. These findings provide preliminary evidence that a third imaging modality may add prognostic value even with limited sample sizes, and that additional modalities require sufficient multimodal context to contribute effectively.

comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, submitted to the IEEE CBMS 2026 conference, still waiting for notification

☆ Learning Structural-Functional Brain Representations through Multi-Scale Adaptive Graph Attention for Cognitive Insight ICASSP 2026

Badhan Mazumder, Sir-Lord Wiafe, Aline Kotoski, Vince D. Calhoun, Dong Hye Ye

Understanding how brain structure and function interact is key to explaining intelligence yet modeling them jointly is challenging as the structural and functional connectome capture complementary aspects of organization. We introduced Multi-scale Adaptive Graph Network (MAGNet), a Transformer-style graph neural network framework that adaptively learns structure-function interactions. MAGNet leverages source-based morphometry from structural MRI to extract inter-regional morphological features and fuses them with functional network connectivity from resting-state fMRI. A hybrid graph integrates direct and indirect pathways, while local-global attention refines connectivity importance and a joint loss simultaneously enforces cross-modal coherence and optimizes the prediction objective end-to-end. On the ABCD dataset, MAGNet outperformed relevant baselines, demonstrating effective multimodal integration for advancing our understanding of cognitive function.

comment: Preprint version of the paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026). This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published version will appear in IEEE Xplore

☆ Scaling Video Pretraining for Surgical Foundation Models

Sicheng Lu, Zikai Xiao, Jianhui Wei, Danyu Sun, Qi Lu, Keli Hu, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Zongxin Yang, Zuozhu Liu

Surgical video understanding is essential for computer-assisted interventions, yet existing surgical foundation models remain constrained by limited data scale, procedural diversity, and inconsistent evaluation, often lacking a reproducible training pipeline. We propose SurgRec, a scalable and reproducible pretraining recipe for surgical video understanding, instantiated with two variants: SurgRec-MAE and SurgRec-JEPA. We curate a large multi-source corpus of 10,535 videos and 214.5M frames spanning endoscopy, laparoscopy, cataract, and robotic surgery. Building on this corpus, we develop a unified pretraining pipeline with balanced sampling and standardize a reproducible benchmark across 16 downstream datasets and four clinical domains with consistent data splits. Across extensive comparisons against SSL baselines and vision-language models, SurgRec consistently achieves superior performance across downstream datasets. In contrast, VLMs prove unreliable for fine-grained temporal recognition, exhibiting both performance gaps and sensitivity to prompt phrasing. Our work provides a reproducible, scalable foundation for the community to build more general surgical video models. All code, models, and data will be publicly released.

☆ SurgTEMP: Temporal-Aware Surgical Video Question Answering with Text-guided Visual Memory for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Shi Li, Vinkle Srivastav, Nicolas Chanel, Saurav Sharma, Nabani Banik, Lorenzo Arboit, Kun Yuan, Pietro Mascagni, Nicolas Padoy

Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to well navigate evolving intraoperative scenes. Computer-assisted systems such as surgical visual question answering (VQA) offer promises for education and intraoperative support. Current surgical VQA research largely focuses on static frame analysis, overlooking rich temporal semantics. Surgical video question answering is further challenged by low visual contrast, its highly knowledge-driven nature, diverse analytical needs spanning scattered temporal windows, and the hierarchy from basic perception to high-level intraoperative assessment. To address these challenges, we propose SurgTEMP, a multimodal LLM framework featuring (i) a query-guided token selection module that builds hierarchical visual memory (spatial and temporal memory banks) and (ii) a Surgical Competency Progression (SCP) training scheme. Together, these components enable effective modeling of variable-length surgical videos while preserving procedure-relevant cues and temporal coherence, and better support diverse downstream assessment tasks. To support model development, we introduce CholeVidQA-32K, a surgical video question answering dataset comprising 32K open-ended QA pairs and 3,855 video segments (approximately 128 h total) from laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The dataset is organized into a three-level hierarchy -- Perception, Assessment, and Reasoning -- spanning 11 tasks from instrument/action/anatomy perception to Critical View of Safety (CVS), intraoperative difficulty, skill proficiency, and adverse event assessment. In comprehensive evaluations against state-of-the-art open-source multimodal and video LLMs (fine-tuned and zero-shot), SurgTEMP achieves substantial performance improvements, advancing the state of video-based surgical VQA.

comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, 9 tables

☆ NeuroBRIDGE: Behavior-Conditioned Koopman Dynamics with Riemannian Alignment for Early Substance Use Initiation Prediction from Longitudinal Functional Connectome ICASSP 2026

Badhan Mazumder, Sir-Lord Wiafe, Vince D. Calhoun, Dong Hye Ye

Early identification of adolescents at risk for substance use initiation (SUI) is vital yet difficult, as most predictors treat connectivity as static or cross-sectional and miss how brain networks change over time and with behavior. We proposed NeuroBRIDGE (Behavior conditioned RIemannian Koopman Dynamics on lonGitudinal connEctomes), a novel graph neural network-based framework that aligns longitudinal functional connectome in a Riemannian tangent space and couples dual-time attention with behavioral-conditioned Koopman dynamics to capture temporal change. Evaluated on ABCD, NeuroBRIDGE improved future SUI prediction over relevant baselines while offering interpretable insights into neural pathways, refining our understanding of neurodevelopmental risk and informing targeted prevention.

comment: Preprint version of the paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026). This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published version will appear in IEEE Xplore

☆ Detecting Unknown Objects via Energy-based Separation for Open World Object Detection CVPR 2026

Jun-Woo Heo, Keonhee Park, Gyeong-Moon Park

In this work, we tackle the problem of Open World Object Detection (OWOD). This challenging scenario requires the detector to incrementally learn to classify known objects without forgetting while identifying unknown objects without supervision. Previous OWOD methods have enhanced the unknown discovery process and employed memory replay to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, since existing methods heavily rely on the detector's known class predictions for detecting unknown objects, they struggle to effectively learn and recognize unknown object representations. Moreover, while memory replay mitigates forgetting of old classes, it often sacrifices the knowledge of newly learned classes. To resolve these limitations, we propose DEUS (Detecting Unknowns via energy-based Separation), a novel framework that addresses the challenges of Open World Object Detection. DEUS consists of Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF)-Subspace Unknown Separation (EUS) and an Energy-based Known Distinction (EKD) loss. EUS leverages ETF-based geometric properties to create orthogonal subspaces, enabling cleaner separation between known and unknown object representations. Unlike prior energy-based approaches that consider only the known space, EUS utilizes energies from both spaces to better capture distinct patterns of unknown objects. Furthermore, EKD loss enforces the separation between previous and current classifiers, thus minimizing knowledge interference between previous and newly learned classes during memory replay. We thoroughly validate DEUS on OWOD benchmarks, demonstrating outstanding performance improvements in unknown detection while maintaining competitive known class performance.

comment: 8 pages, Accepted at CVPR 2026

☆ EC-Bench: Enumeration and Counting Benchmark for Ultra-Long Videos

Fumihiko Tsuchiya, Taiki Miyanishi, Mahiro Ukai, Nakamasa Inoue, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo

Counting in long videos remains a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in computer vision. Real-world recordings often span tens of minutes or longer and contain sparse, diverse events, making long-range temporal reasoning particularly difficult. However, most existing video counting benchmarks focus on short clips and evaluate only the final numerical answer, providing little insight into what should be counted or whether models consistently identify relevant instances across time. We introduce EC-Bench, a benchmark that jointly evaluates enumeration, counting, and temporal evidence grounding in long-form videos. EC-Bench contains 152 videos longer than 30 minutes and 1,699 queries paired with explicit evidence spans. Across 22 multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the best model achieves only 29.98% accuracy on Enumeration and 23.74% on Counting, while human performance reaches 78.57% and 82.97%, respectively. Our analysis reveals strong relationships between enumeration accuracy, temporal grounding, and counting performance. These results highlight fundamental limitations of current MLLMs and establish EC-Bench as a challenging benchmark for long-form quantitative video reasoning.

comment: The first two authors are equally contributed. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/matsuolab/EC-Bench

☆ Better than Average: Spatially-Aware Aggregation of Segmentation Uncertainty Improves Downstream Performance CVPR 2026

Vanessa Emanuela Guarino, Claudia Winklmayr, Jannik Franzen, Josef Lorenz Rumberger, Manuel Pfeuffer, Sonja Greven, Klaus Maier-Hein, Carsten T. Lüth, Christoph Karg, Dagmar Kainmueller

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of automated image segmentations in safety-critical domains like biomedical image analysis or autonomous driving. In segmentation, UQ generates pixel-wise uncertainty scores that must be aggregated into image-level scores for downstream tasks like Out-of-Distribution (OoD) or failure detection. Despite routine use of aggregation strategies, their properties and impact on downstream task performance have not yet been comprehensively studied. Global Average is the default choice, yet it does not account for spatial and structural features of segmentation uncertainty. Alternatives like patch-, class- and threshold-based strategies exist, but lack systematic comparison, leading to inconsistent reporting and unclear best practices. We address this gap by (1) formally analyzing properties, limitations, and pitfalls of common strategies; (2) proposing novel strategies that incorporate spatial uncertainty structure and (3) benchmarking their performance on OoD and failure detection across ten datasets that vary in image geometry and structure. We find that aggregators leveraging spatial structure yield stronger performance in both downstream tasks studied. However, the performance of individual aggregators depends heavily on dataset characteristics, so we (4) propose a meta-aggregator that integrates multiple aggregators and performs robustly across datasets.

comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables. Accepted at CVPR 2026 (The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026)

☆ Gloria: Consistent Character Video Generation via Content Anchors CVPR2026

Yuhang Yang, Fan Zhang, Huaijin Pi, Shuai Guo, Guowei Xu, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha

Digital characters are central to modern media, yet generating character videos with long-duration, consistent multi-view appearance and expressive identity remains challenging. Existing approaches either provide insufficient context to preserve identity or leverage non-character-centric information as the memory, leading to suboptimal consistency. Recognizing that character video generation inherently resembles an outside-looking-in scenario. In this work, we propose representing the character visual attributes through a compact set of anchor frames. This design provides stable references for consistency, while reference-based video generation inherently faces challenges of copy-pasting and multi-reference conflicts. To address these, we introduce two mechanisms: Superset Content Anchoring, providing intra- and extra-training clip cues to prevent duplication, and RoPE as Weak Condition, encoding positional offsets to distinguish multiple anchors. Furthermore, we construct a scalable pipeline to extract these anchors from massive videos. Experiments show our method generates high-quality character videos exceeding 10 minutes, and achieves expressive identity and appearance consistency across views, surpassing existing methods.

comment: Accepted by CVPR2026 Main, project: https://yyvhang.github.io/Gloria_Page/

☆ End-to-End Image Compression with Segmentation Guided Dual Coding for Wind Turbines

Raül Pérez-Gonzalo, Andreas Espersen, Søren Forchhammer, Antonio Agudo

Transferring large volumes of high-resolution images during wind turbine inspections introduces a bottleneck in assessing and detecting severe defects. Efficient coding must preserve high fidelity in blade regions while aggressively compressing the background. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework that jointly performs segmentation and dual-mode (lossy and lossless) compression. The segmentation module accurately identifies the blade region, after which our region-of-interest (ROI) compressor encodes it at superior quality compared to the rest of the image. Unlike conventional ROI schemes that merely allocate more bits to salient areas, our framework integrates: (i) a robust segmentation network (BU-Netv2+P) with a CRF-regularized loss for precise blade localization, (ii) a hyperprior-based autoencoder optimized for lossy compression, and (iii) an extended bits-back coder with hierarchical models for fully lossless blade reconstruction. Furthermore, our ROI framework removes the sequential dependency in bits-back coding by reusing background-coded bits, enabling parallelized and efficient dual-mode compression. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully integrated learning-based ROI codec combining segmentation, lossy, and lossless compression, ensuring that subsequent defect detection is not compromised. Experiments on a large-scale wind turbine dataset demonstrate superior compression performance and efficiency, offering a practical solution for automated inspections.

comment: Accepted to TNNLS 2026

☆ Abstraction in Style

Min Lu, Yuanfeng He, Anthony Chen, Jianhuang He, Pu Wang, Daniel Cohen-Or, Hui Huang

Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.

comment: siggraph 2026 conditionally accepted paper

☆ Training deep learning based dynamic MR image reconstruction using synthetic fractals

Anirudh Raman, Olivier Jaubert, Mark Wrobel, Tina Yao, Ruaraidh Campbell, Rebecca Baker, Ruta Virsinskaite, Daniel Knight, Michael Quail, Jennifer Steeden, Vivek Muthurangu

Purpose: To investigate whether synthetically generated fractal data can be used to train deep learning (DL) models for dynamic MRI reconstruction, thereby avoiding the privacy, licensing, and availability limitations associated with cardiac MR training datasets. Methods: A training dataset was generated using quaternion Julia fractals to produce 2D+time images. Multi-coil MRI acquisition was simulated to generate paired fully sampled and radially undersampled k-space data. A 3D UNet deep artefact suppression model was trained using these fractal data (F-DL) and compared with an identical model trained on cardiac MRI data (CMR-DL). Both models were evaluated on prospectively acquired radial real-time cardiac MRI from 10 patients. Reconstructions were compared against compressed sensing(CS) and low-rank deep image prior (LR-DIP). All reconstrctuions were ranked for image quality, while ventricular volumes and ejection fraction were compared with reference breath-hold cine MRI. Results: There was no significant difference in qualitative ranking between F-DL and CMR-DL (p=0.9), while both outperformed CS and LR-DIP (p<0.001). Ventricular volumes and function derived from F-DL were similar to CMR-DL, showing no significant bias and accptable limits of agreement compared to reference cine imaging. However, LR-DIP had a signifcant bias (p=0.016) and wider lmits of agreement. Conclusion: DL models trained using synthetic fractal data can reconstruct real-time cardiac MRI with image quality and clinical measurements comparable to models trained on true cardiac MRI data. Fractal training data provide an open, scalable alternative to clinical datasets and may enable development of more generalisable DL reconstruction models for dynamic MRI.

☆ Diffusion-Based Feature Denoising with NNMF for Robust handwritten digit multi-class classification

Hiba Adil Al-kharsan, Róbert Rajkó

This work presents a robust multi-class classification framework for handwritten digits that combines diffusion-driven feature denoising with a hybrid feature representation. Inspired by our previous work on brain tumor classification, the proposed approach operates in a feature space to improve the robustness to noise and adversarial attacks. First, the input images are converted into tight, interpretable exemplification using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NNMF). In parallel, special deep features are extracted using a computational neural network (CNN). These integral features are combined into a united hybrid representation. To improve robustness, a step diffusion operation is used in the feature space by gradually adding Gaussian noise. A feature denoiser network is trained to reverse this operation and rebuild clean representations from tilted inputs. The courteous features are then applied for multi-class classification. The suggested method is evaluated in both baseline and adversarial settings using AutoAttack. The experimental outcome present that the diffusion-based hybrid model is both effective and robust, the CNN baseline models outperforming while maintain powerful classification performance. These results explain the activity of feature-level diffusion defense for reliable multi-class handwritten digit classification.

☆ Less Is More? Selective Visual Attention to High-Importance Regions for Multimodal Radiology Summarization

Mst. Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Adnan Ibney Faruq, Mushfiqur Rahman, Niloy Kumar Mondal, Md. Mehedi Hasan Shawon, Md Rakibul Hasan

Automated radiology report summarization aims to distill verbose findings into concise clinical impressions, but existing multimodal models often struggle with visual noise and fail to meaningfully improve over strong text-only baselines in the FINDINGS $\to$ IMPRESSION transformation. We challenge two prevailing assumptions: (1) that more visual input is always better, and (2) that multimodal models add limited value when findings already contain rich image-derived detail. Through controlled ablations on MIMIC-CXR benchmark, we show that selectively focusing on pathology-relevant visual patches rather than full images yields substantially better performance. We introduce ViTAS, Visual-Text Attention Summarizer, a multi-stage pipeline that combines ensemble-guided MedSAM2 lung segmentation, bidirectional cross-attention for multi-view fusion, Shapley-guided adaptive patch clustering, and hierarchical visual tokenization feeding a ViT. ViTAS achieves SOTA results with 29.25% BLEU-4 and 69.83% ROUGE-L, improved factual alignment in qualitative analysis, and the highest expert-rated human evaluation scores. Our findings demonstrate that less but more relevant visual input is not only sufficient but superior for multimodal radiology summarization.

☆ DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA

Yi Chen, Yuying Ge, Hui Zhou, Mingyu Ding, Yixiao Ge, Xihui Liu

The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.

comment: Project page: https://xpeng-robotics.github.io/dial

☆ Toward Generalizable Whole Brain Representations with High-Resolution Light-Sheet Data CVPR 2026

Minyoung E. Kim, Dae Hee Yun, Aditi V. Patel, Madeline Hon, Webster Guan, Taegeon Lee, Brian Nguyen

Unprecedented visual details of biological structures are being revealed by subcellular-resolution whole-brain 3D microscopy data, enabled by recent advances in intact tissue processing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). These volumetric data offer rich morphological and spatial cellular information, however, the lack of scalable data processing and analysis methods tailored to these petabyte-scale data poses a substantial challenge for accurate interpretation. Further, existing models for visual tasks such as object detection and classification struggle to generalize to this type of data. To accelerate the development of suitable methods and foundational models, we present CANVAS, a comprehensive set of high-resolution whole mouse brain LSFM benchmark data, encompassing six neuronal and immune cell-type markers, along with cell annotations and a leaderboard. We also demonstrate challenges in generalization of baseline models built on existing architectures, especially due to the heterogeneity in cellular morphology across phenotypes and anatomical locations in the brain. To the best of our knowledge, CANVAS is the first and largest LSFM benchmark that captures intact mouse brain tissue at subcellular level, and includes extensive annotations of cells throughout the brain.

comment: 21 pages, 12 figures. Accepted at CVPR 2026

☆ AutoFormBench: Benchmark Dataset for Automating Form Understanding

Gaurab Baral, Junxiu Zhou

Automated processing of structured documents such as government forms, healthcare records, and enterprise invoices remains a persistent challenge due to the high degree of layout variability encountered in real-world settings. This paper introduces AutoFormBench, a benchmark dataset of 407 annotated real-world forms spanning government, healthcare, and enterprise domains, designed to train and evaluate form element detection models. We present a systematic comparison of classical OpenCV approaches and four YOLO architectures (YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv26-s, and YOLOv26-l) for localizing and classifying fillable form elements. specifically checkboxes, input lines, and text boxes across diverse PDF document types. YOLOv11 demonstrates consistently superior performance in both F1 score and Jaccard accuracy across all element classes and tolerance levels.

comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

☆ SceneTeract: Agentic Functional Affordances and VLM Grounding in 3D Scenes

Léopold Maillard, Francis Engelmann, Tom Durand, Boxiao Pan, Yang You, Or Litany, Leonidas Guibas, Maks Ovsjanikov

Embodied AI depends on interactive 3D environments that support meaningful activities for diverse users, yet assessing their functional affordances remains a core challenge. We introduce SceneTeract, a framework that verifies 3D scene functionality under agent-specific constraints. Our core contribution is a grounded verification engine that couples high-level semantic reasoning with low-level geometric checks. SceneTeract decomposes complex activities into sequences of atomic actions and validates each step against accessibility requirements (e.g., reachability, clearance, and navigability) conditioned on an embodied agent profile, using explicit physical and geometric simulations. We deploy SceneTeract to perform an in-depth evaluation of (i) synthetic indoor environments, uncovering frequent functional failures that prevent basic interactions, and (ii) the ability of frontier Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about and predict functional affordances, revealing systematic mismatches between semantic confidence and physical feasibility even for the strongest current models. Finally, we leverage SceneTeract as a reward engine for VLM post-training, enabling scalable distillation of geometric constraints into reasoning models. We release the SceneTeract verification suite and data to bridge perception and physical reality in embodied 3D scene understanding.

comment: Project page: https://sceneteract.github.io/

☆ Multi-Feature Fusion Approach for Generative AI Images Detection

Abderrezzaq Sendjasni, Mohamed-Chaker Larabi

The rapid evolution of Generative AI (GenAI) models has led to synthetic images of unprecedented realism, challenging traditional methods for distinguishing them from natural photographs. While existing detectors often rely on single-feature spaces, such as statistical regularities, semantic embeddings, or texture patterns, these approaches tend to lack robustness when confronted with diverse and evolving generative models. In this work, we investigate and systematically evaluate a multi-feature fusion framework that combines complementary cues from three distinct spaces: (1) Mean Subtracted Contrast Normalized (MSCN) features capturing low-level statistical deviations; (2) CLIP embeddings encoding high-level semantic coherence; and (3) Multi-scale Local Binary Patterns (MLBP) characterizing mid-level texture anomalies. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets covering a wide range of generative models, we show that individual feature spaces exhibit significant performance variability across different generators. Crucially, the fusion of all three representations yields superior and more consistent performance, particularly in a challenging mixed-model scenario. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed framework yields consistently improved performance across all evaluated datasets. Overall, this work highlights the importance of hybrid representations for robust GenAI image detection and provides a principled framework for integrating complementary visual cues.

comment: This work has been submitted to IEEE Transactions for possible publication

☆ MAPLE: Multi-Path Adaptive Propagation with Level-Aware Embeddings for Hierarchical Multi-Label Image Classification

Boshko Koloski, Marjan Stoimchev, Jurica Levatić, Dragi Kocev, Sašo Džeroski

Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) is essential for modeling structured label dependencies in remote sensing. Yet existing approaches struggle in multi-path settings, where images may activate multiple taxonomic branches, leading to underuse of hierarchical information. We propose MAPLE (Multi-Path Adaptive Propagation with Level-Aware Embeddings), a framework that integrates (i) hierarchical semantic initialization from graph-aware textual descriptions, (ii) graph-based structure encoding via graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and (iii) adaptive multi-modal fusion that dynamically balances semantic priors and visual evidence. An adaptive level-aware objective automatically selects appropriate losses per hierarchy level. Evaluations on CORINE-aligned remote sensing datasets (AID, DFC-15, and MLRSNet) show consistent improvements of up to +42% in few-shot regimes while adding only 2.6% parameter overhead, demonstrating that MAPLE effectively and efficiently models hierarchical semantics for Earth observation (EO).

comment: REO: Advances in Representation Learning for Earth Observation, accepted workshow paper at EurIPS

☆ From Skeletons to Semantics: Design and Deployment of a Hybrid Edge-Based Action Detection System for Public Safety

Ganen Sethupathy, Lalit Dumka, Jan Schagen

Public spaces such as transport hubs, city centres, and event venues require timely and reliable detection of potentially violent behaviour to support public safety. While automated video analysis has made significant progress, practical deployment remains constrained by latency, privacy, and resource limitations, particularly under edge-computing conditions. This paper presents the design and demonstrator-based deployment of a hybrid edge-based action detection system that combines skeleton-based motion analysis with vision-language models for semantic scene interpretation. Skeleton-based processing enables continuous, privacy-aware monitoring with low computational overhead, while vision-language models provide contextual understanding and zero-shot reasoning capabilities for complex and previously unseen situations. Rather than proposing new recognition models, the contribution focuses on a system-level comparison of both paradigms under realistic edge constraints. The system is implemented on a GPU-enabled edge device and evaluated with respect to latency, resource usage, and operational trade-offs using a demonstrator-based setup. The results highlight the complementary strengths and limitations of motioncentric and semantic approaches and motivate a hybrid architecture that selectively augments fast skeletonbased detection with higher-level semantic reasoning. The presented system provides a practical foundation for privacy-aware, real-time video analysis in public safety applications.

comment: Preprint version of a manuscript currently under review at IEEE Access

☆ Beyond Ground-Truth: Leveraging Image Quality Priors for Real-World Image Restoration CVPR

Fengyang Xiao, Peng Hu, Lei Xu, XingE Guo, Guanyi Qin, Yuqi Shen, Chengyu Fang, Rihan Zhang, Chunming He, Sina Farsiu

Real-world image restoration aims to restore high-quality (HQ) images from degraded low-quality (LQ) inputs captured under uncontrolled conditions. Existing methods typically depend on ground-truth (GT) supervision, assuming that GT provides perfect reference quality. However, GT can still contain images with inconsistent perceptual fidelity, causing models to converge to the average quality level of the training data rather than achieving the highest perceptual quality attainable. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework, termed IQPIR, that introduces an Image Quality Prior (IQP)-extracted from pre-trained No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) models-to guide the restoration process toward perceptually optimal outputs explicitly. Our approach synergistically integrates IQP with a learned codebook prior through three key mechanisms: (1) a quality-conditioned Transformer, where NR-IQA-derived scores serve as conditioning signals to steer the predicted representation toward maximal perceptual quality. This design provides a plug-and-play enhancement compatible with existing restoration architectures without structural modification; and (2) a dual-branch codebook structure, which disentangles common and HQ-specific features, ensuring a comprehensive representation of both generic structural information and quality-sensitive attributes; and (3) a discrete representation-based quality optimization strategy, which mitigates over-optimization effects commonly observed in continuous latent spaces. Extensive experiments on real-world image restoration demonstrate that our method not only surpasses cutting-edge methods but also serves as a generalizable quality-guided enhancement strategy for existing methods. The code is available.

comment: Accepted by CVPR

☆ TSHA: A Benchmark for Visual Language Models in Trustworthy Safety Hazard Assessment Scenarios

Qiucheng Yu, Ruijie Xu, Mingang Chen, Xuequan Lu, Jianfeng Dong, Chaochao Lu, Xin Tan

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have accelerated their application to indoor safety hazards assessment. However, existing benchmarks suffer from three fundamental limitations: (1) heavy reliance on synthetic datasets constructed via simulation software, creating a significant domain gap with real-world environments; (2) oversimplified safety tasks with artificial constraints on hazard and scene types, thereby limiting model generalization; and (3) absence of rigorous evaluation protocols to thoroughly assess model capabilities in complex home safety scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce TSHA (\textbf{T}rustworthy \textbf{S}afety \textbf{H}azards \textbf{A}ssessment), a comprehensive benchmark comprising 81,809 carefully curated training samples drawn from four complementary sources: existing indoor datasets, internet images, AIGC images, and newly captured images. This benchmark set also includes a highly challenging test set with 1707 samples, comprising not only a carefully selected subset from the training distribution but also newly added videos and panoramic images containing multiple safety hazards, used to evaluate the model's robustness in complex safety scenarios. Extensive experiments on 23 popular VLMs demonstrate that current VLMs lack robust capabilities for safety hazard assessment. Importantly, models trained on the TSHA training set not only achieve a significant performance improvement of up to +18.3 points on the TSHA test set but also exhibit enhanced generalizability across other benchmarks, underscoring the substantial contribution and importance of the TSHA benchmark.

☆ SHIFT: Stochastic Hidden-Trajectory Deflection for Removing Diffusion-based Watermark

Rui Bao, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

Diffusion-based watermarking methods embed verifiable marks by manipulating the initial noise or the reverse diffusion trajectory. However, these methods share a critical assumption: verification can succeed only if the diffusion trajectory can be faithfully reconstructed. This reliance on trajectory recovery constitutes a fundamental and exploitable vulnerability. We propose $\underline{\mathbf{S}}$tochastic $\underline{\mathbf{Hi}}$dden-Trajectory De$\underline{\mathbf{f}}$lec$\underline{\mathbf{t}}$ion ($\mathbf{SHIFT}$), a training-free attack that exploits this common weakness across diverse watermarking paradigms. SHIFT leverages stochastic diffusion resampling to deflect the generative trajectory in latent space, making the reconstructed image statistically decoupled from the original watermark-embedded trajectory while preserving strong visual quality and semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on nine representative watermarking methods spanning noise-space, frequency-domain, and optimization-based paradigms show that SHIFT achieves 95%--100% attack success rates with nearly no loss in semantic quality, without requiring any watermark-specific knowledge or model retraining.

☆ GRVS: a Generalizable and Recurrent Approach to Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis CVPR

Thomas Tanay, Mohammed Brahimi, Michal Nazarczuk, Qingwen Zhang, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Arthur Moreau, Zhensong Zhang, Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero

Synthesizing novel views from monocular videos of dynamic scenes remains a challenging problem. Scene-specific methods that optimize 4D representations with explicit motion priors often break down in highly dynamic regions where multi-view information is hard to exploit. Diffusion-based approaches that integrate camera control into large pre-trained models can produce visually plausible videos but frequently suffer from geometric inconsistencies across both static and dynamic areas. Both families of methods also require substantial computational resources. Building on the success of generalizable models for static novel view synthesis, we adapt the framework to dynamic inputs and propose a new model with two key components: (1) a recurrent loop that enables unbounded and asynchronous mapping between input and target videos and (2) an efficient use of plane sweeps over dynamic inputs to disentangle camera and scene motion, and achieve fine-grained, six-degrees-of-freedom camera controls. We train and evaluate our model on the UCSD dataset and on Kubric-4D-dyn, a new monocular dynamic dataset featuring longer, higher resolution sequences with more complex scene dynamics than existing alternatives. Our model outperforms four Gaussian Splatting-based scene-specific approaches, as well as two diffusion-based approaches in reconstructing fine-grained geometric details across both static and dynamic regions.

comment: CVPR Findings 2026

☆ Leveraging Synthetic Data for Enhancing Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Rosario Leonardi, Antonino Furnari, Francesco Ragusa, Giovanni Maria Farinella

In this work, we explore the role of synthetic data in improving the detection of Hand-Object Interactions from egocentric images. Through extensive experimentation and comparative analysis on VISOR, EgoHOS, and ENIGMA-51 datasets, our findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic data to significantly improve HOI detection, particularly when real labeled data are scarce or unavailable. By using synthetic data and only 10% of the real labeled data, we achieve improvements in Overall AP over models trained exclusively on real data, with gains of +5.67% on VISOR, +8.24% on EgoHOS, and +11.69% on ENIGMA-51. Furthermore, we systematically study how aligning synthetic data to specific real-world benchmarks with respect to objects, grasps, and environments, showing that the effectiveness of synthetic data consistently improves with better synthetic-real alignment. As a result of this work, we release a new data generation pipeline and the new HOI-Synth benchmark, which augments existing datasets with synthetic images of hand-object interaction. These data are automatically annotated with hand-object contact states, bounding boxes, and pixel-wise segmentation masks. All data, code, and tools for synthetic data generation are available at: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/HOI-Synth/.

☆ Compressive sensing inspired self-supervised single-pixel imaging

Jijun Lu, Yifan Chen, Libang Chen, Yiqiang Zhou, Ye Zheng, Mingliang Chen, Zhe Sun, Xuelong Li

Single-pixel imaging (SPI) is a promising imaging modality with distinctive advantages in strongly perturbed environments. Existing SPI methods lack physical sparsity constraints and overlook the integration of local and global features, leading to severe noise vulnerability, structural distortions and blurred details. To address these limitations, we propose SISTA-Net, a compressive sensing-inspired self-supervised method for single-pixel imaging. SISTA-Net unfolds the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) into an interpretable network consisting of a data fidelity module and a proximal mapping module. The fidelity module adopts a hybrid CNN-Visual State Space Model (VSSM) architecture to integrate local and global feature modeling, enhancing reconstruction integrity and fidelity. We leverage deep nonlinear networks as adaptive sparse transforms combined with a learnable soft-thresholding operator to impose explicit physical sparsity in the latent domain, enabling noise suppression and robustness to interference even at extremely low sampling rates. Extensive experiments on multiple simulation scenarios demonstrate that SISTA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.6 dB in PSNR. Real-world far-field underwater tests yield a 3.4 dB average PSNR improvement, validating its robust anti-interference capability.

comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 2 algorithms, 2 tables, journal paper

☆ FED-Bench: A Cross-Granular Benchmark for Disentangled Evaluation of Facial Expression Editing

Fengjian Xue, Xuecheng Wu, Heli Sun, Yunyun Shi, Shi Chen, Liangyu Fu, Jinheng Xie, Dingkang Yang, Hao Wang, Junxiao Xue, Liang He

Facial expression image editing requires fine-grained control to strictly preserve human identity and background while precisely manipulating expression. However, existing editing benchmarks primarily focus on general scenarios, lacking high-quality facial images and corresponding editing instructions. Furthermore, current evaluation metrics exhibit systemic biases in this task, often favoring lazy editing or overfit editing. To bridge these gaps, we propose FED-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring rigorous testing and an accurate evaluation suite. First, we carefully construct a benchmark of 747 triplets through a cascaded and scalable pipeline, each comprising an original image, an editing instruction, and a ground-truth image for precise evaluation. Second, we introduce FED-Score, a cross-granularity evaluation protocol that disentangles assessment into three dimensions: Alignment for verifying instruction following, Fidelity for testing image quality and identity preservation, and Relative Expression Gain for quantifying the magnitude of expression changes, effectively mitigating the aforementioned evaluation biases. Third, we benchmark 18 image editing models, revealing that current approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve high fidelity and accurate expression manipulation, with fine-grained instruction following identified as the primary bottleneck. Finally, leveraging the scalable characteristic of introduced benchmark engine, we provide a 20k+ in-the-wild facial training set and demonstrate its effectiveness by fine-tuning a baseline model that achieves significant performance gains. Our benchmark and related code will be made publicly open soon.

☆ Exploring the Impact of Skin Color on Skin Lesion Segmentation

Kuniko Paxton, Medina Kapo, Amila Akagić, Koorosh Aslansefat, Dhavalkumar Thakker, Yiannis Papadopoulos

Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality, making early detection critical. AI-driven dermatology systems often rely on skin lesion segmentation as a preprocessing step to delineate the lesion from surrounding skin and support downstream analysis. While fairness concerns regarding skin tone have been widely studied for lesion classification, the influence of skin tone on the segmentation stage remains under-quantified and is frequently assessed using coarse, discrete skin tone categories. In this work, we evaluate three strong segmentation architectures (UNet, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet50 backbone, and DINOv2) on two public dermoscopic datasets (HAM10000 and ISIC2017) and introduce a continuous pigment or contrast analysis that treats pixel-wise ITA values as distributions. Using Wasserstein distances between within-image distributions for skin-only, lesion-only, and whole-image regions, we quantify lesion skin contrast and relate it to segmentation performance across multiple metrics. Within the range represented in these datasets, global skin tone metrics (Fitzpatrick grouping or mean ITA) show weak association with segmentation quality. In contrast, low lesion-skin contrast is consistently associated with larger segmentation errors in models, indicating that boundary ambiguity and low contrast are key drivers of failure. These findings suggest that fairness improvements in dermoscopic segmentation should prioritize robust handling of low-contrast lesions, and the distribution-based pigment measures provide a more informative audit signal than discrete skin-tone categories.

☆ SkeletonContext: Skeleton-side Context Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition CVPR 2026

Ning Wang, Tieyue Wu, Naeha Sharif, Farid Boussaid, Guangming Zhu, Lin Mei, Mohammed Bennamoun, zhang liang

Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition aims to recognize unseen actions by transferring knowledge from seen categories through semantic descriptions. Most existing methods typically align skeleton features with textual embeddings within a shared latent space. However, the absence of contextual cues, such as objects involved in the action, introduces an inherent gap between skeleton and semantic representations, making it difficult to distinguish visually similar actions. To address this, we propose SkeletonContext, a prompt-based framework that enriches skeletal motion representations with language-driven contextual semantics. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Modal Context Prompt Module, which leverages a pretrained language model to reconstruct masked contextual prompts under guidance derived from LLMs. This design effectively transfers linguistic context to the skeleton encoder for instance-level semantic grounding and improved cross-modal alignment. In addition, a Key-Part Decoupling Module is incorporated to decouple motion-relevant joint features, ensuring robust action understanding even in the absence of explicit object interactions. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SkeletonContext achieves state-of-the-art performance under both conventional and generalized zero-shot settings, validating its effectiveness in reasoning about context and distinguishing fine-grained, visually similar actions.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026

☆ A Comprehensive Information-Decomposition Analysis of Large Vision-Language Models ICLR 2026

Lixin Xiu, Xufang Luo, Hideki Nakayama

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve impressive performance, yet their internal decision-making processes remain opaque, making it difficult to determine if the success stems from true multimodal fusion or from reliance on unimodal priors. To address this attribution gap, we introduce a novel framework using partial information decomposition (PID) to quantitatively measure the "information spectrum" of LVLMs -- decomposing a model's decision-relevant information into redundant, unique, and synergistic components. By adapting a scalable estimator to modern LVLM outputs, our model-agnostic pipeline profiles 26 LVLMs on four datasets across three dimensions -- breadth (cross-model & cross-task), depth (layer-wise information dynamics), and time (learning dynamics across training). Our analysis reveals two key results: (i) two task regimes (synergy-driven vs. knowledge-driven) and (ii) two stable, contrasting family-level strategies (fusion-centric vs. language-centric). We also uncover a consistent three-phase pattern in layer-wise processing and identify visual instruction tuning as the key stage where fusion is learned. Together, these contributions provide a quantitative lens beyond accuracy-only evaluation and offer insights for analyzing and designing the next generation of LVLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/RiiShin/pid-lvlm-analysis .

comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026. Project page: https://riishin.github.io/pid-lvlm-iclr26/

☆ Clinical DVH metrics as a loss function for 3D dose prediction in head and neck radiotherapy

Ruochen Gao, Marius Staring, Frank Dankers

Purpose: Deep-learning-based three-dimensional (3D) dose prediction is widely used in automated radiotherapy workflows. However, most existing models are trained with voxel-wise regression losses, which are poorly aligned with clinical plan evaluation criteria based on dose-volume histogram (DVH) metrics. This study aims to develop a clinically guided loss formulation that directly optimizes clinically used DVH metrics while remaining computationally efficient for head and neck (H\&N) dose prediction. Methods: We propose a clinical DVH metric loss (CDM loss) that incorporates differentiable \textit{D-metrics} and surrogate \textit{V-metrics}, together with a lossless bit-mask region-of-interest (ROI) encoding to improve training efficiency. The method was evaluated on 174 H\&N patients using a temporal split (137 training, 37 testing). Results: Compared with MAE- and DVH-curve based losses, CDM loss substantially improved target coverage and satisfied all clinical constraints. Using a standard 3D U-Net, the PTV Score was reduced from 1.544 (MAE) to 0.491 (MAE + CDM), while OAR sparing remained comparable. Bit-mask encoding reduced training time by 83\% and lowered GPU memory usage. Conclusion: Directly optimizing clinically used DVH metrics enables 3D dose predictions that are better aligned with clinical treatment planning criteria than conventional voxel-wise or DVH-curve-based supervision. The proposed CDM loss, combined with efficient ROI bit-mask encoding, provides a practical and scalable framework for H\&N dose prediction.

comment: 19 pages

☆ CoRe-DA: Contrastive Regression for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Surgical Skill Assessment

Dimitrios Anastasiou, Razvan Caramalau, Jialang Xu, Runlong He, Freweini Tesfai, Matthew Boal, Nader Francis, Danail Stoyanov, Evangelos B. Mazomenos

Vision-based surgical skill assessment (SSA) enables objective and scalable evaluation of operative performance. Progress in this field is constrained by the high cost and time demands for manual annotation of quantitative skill scores, as well as the poor generalization of existing regression models to new surgical tasks and environments. Meanwhile, appreciable volumes of unlabeled video data are now available, motivating the development of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for SSA. We introduce the first benchmark for UDA in SSA regression, spanning four datasets across dry-lab and clinical settings as well as open and robotic surgery. We evaluate eight representative models under challenging domain shifts and propose CoRe-DA, a novel contrastive regression-based adaptation framework. Our method learns domain-invariant representations through relative-score supervision and target-domain self-training. Comprehensive experiments across two UDA settings show that CoRe-DA is superior to state-of-the-art methods, achieving Spearman Correlation Coefficients of 0.46 and 0.41 on dry-lab and clinical target datasets, respectively, without using any labeled target data for training. Overall, CoRe-DA enables scalable SSA with reliable cross-domain generalization, where existing methods underperform. Our code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/anastadimi/CoRe-DA.

☆ CutClaw: Agentic Hours-Long Video Editing via Music Synchronization

Shifang Zhao, Yihan Hu, Ying Shan, Yunchao Wei, Xiaodong Cun

Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.

comment: Project Code: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw

☆ STRADAViT: Towards a Foundational Model for Radio Astronomy through Self-Supervised Transfer

Andrea DeMarco, Ian Fenech Conti, Hayley Camilleri, Ardiana Bushi, Simone Riggi

Next-generation radio astronomy surveys are producing millions of resolved sources, but robust morphology analysis remains difficult across heterogeneous telescopes and imaging pipelines. We present STRADAViT, a self-supervised Vision Transformer continued-pretraining framework for transferable radio astronomy image encoders. STRADAViT combines a mixed-survey pretraining dataset, radio astronomy-aware view generation, and controlled continued pretraining through reconstruction-only, contrastive-only, and two-stage branches. Pretraining uses 512x512 radio astronomy cutouts from MeerKAT, ASKAP, LOFAR/LoTSS, and SKA data. We evaluate transfer with linear probing and fine-tuning on three morphology benchmarks: MiraBest, LoTSS DR2, and Radio Galaxy Zoo. Relative to the initialization used for continued pretraining, the best two-stage STRADAViT models improve Macro-F1 in all reported linear-probe settings and in most fine-tuning settings, with the largest gain on RGZ DR1. Relative to strong DINOv2 baselines, gains are selective but remain positive on LoTSS DR2 and RGZ DR1 under linear probing, and on MiraBest and RGZ DR1 under fine-tuning. A targeted DINOv2-initialized HCL ablation further shows that the adaptation recipe is not specific to a single starting point. The released STRADAViT checkpoint remains the preferred model because it offers competitive transfer at lower token count and downstream cost than the DINOv2-based alternative. These results show that radio astronomy-aware view generation and staged continued pretraining provide a stronger starting point than out-of-the-box Vision Transformers for radio astronomy transfer.

comment: 19 pages

☆ Not All Frames Are Equal: Complexity-Aware Masked Motion Generation via Motion Spectral Descriptors

Pengfei Zhou, Xiangyue Zhang, Xukun Shen, Yong Hu

Masked generative models have become a strong paradigm for text-to-motion synthesis, but they still treat motion frames too uniformly during masking, attention, and decoding. This is a poor match for motion, where local dynamic complexity varies sharply over time. We show that current masked motion generators degrade disproportionately on dynamically complex motions, and that frame-wise generation error is strongly correlated with motion dynamics. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce the Motion Spectral Descriptor (MSD), a simple and parameter-free measure of local dynamic complexity computed from the short-time spectrum of motion velocity. Unlike learned difficulty predictors, MSD is deterministic, interpretable, and derived directly from the motion signal itself. We use MSD to make masked motion generation complexity-aware. In particular, MSD guides content-focused masking during training, provides a spectral similarity prior for self-attention, and can additionally modulate token-level sampling during iterative decoding. Built on top of masked motion generators, our method, DynMask, improves motion generation most clearly on dynamically complex motions while also yielding stronger overall FID on HumanML3D and KIT-ML. These results suggest that respecting local motion complexity is a useful design principle for masked motion generation. Project page: https://xiangyue-zhang.github.io/DynMask

☆ MacTok: Robust Continuous Tokenization for Image Generation

Hengyu Zeng, Xin Gao, Guanghao Li, Yuxiang Yan, Jiaoyang Ruan, Junpeng Ma, Haoyu Albert Wang, Jian Pu

Continuous image tokenizers enable efficient visual generation, and those based on variational frameworks can learn smooth, structured latent representations through KL regularization. Yet this often leads to posterior collapse when using fewer tokens, where the encoder fails to encode informative features into the compressed latent space. To address this, we introduce \textbf{MacTok}, a \textbf{M}asked \textbf{A}ugmenting 1D \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{Tok}enizer that leverages image masking and representation alignment to prevent collapse while learning compact and robust representations. MacTok applies both random masking to regularize latent learning and DINO-guided semantic masking to emphasize informative regions in images, forcing the model to encode robust semantics from incomplete visual evidence. Combined with global and local representation alignment, MacTok preserves rich discriminative information in a highly compressed 1D latent space, requiring only 64 or 128 tokens. On ImageNet, MacTok achieves a competitive gFID of 1.44 at 256$\times$256 and a state-of-the-art 1.52 at 512$\times$512 with SiT-XL, while reducing token usage by up to 64$\times$. These results confirm that masking and semantic guidance together prevent posterior collapse and achieve efficient, high-fidelity tokenization.

☆ Self-Supervised Federated Learning under Data Heterogeneity for Label-Scarce Diatom Classification

Mingkun Tan, Xilu Wang, Michael Kloster, Tim W. Nattkemper

Label-scarce visual classification under decentralized and heterogeneous data is a fundamental challenge in pattern recognition, especially when sites exhibit partially overlapping class sets. While self-supervised federated learning (SSFL) offers a promising solution, existing studies commonly assume the same data heterogeneity pattern throughout pre-training and fine-tuning. Moreover, current partitioning schemes often fail to generate pure partially class-disjoint data settings, limiting controllable simulation of real-world label-space heterogeneity. In this work, we introduce SSFL for diatom classification as a representative real-world instance and systematically investigate stage-specific data heterogeneity. We study cross-site variation in unlabeled data volume during pre-training and label-space misalignment during downstream fine-tuning. To study the latter in a controllable setting, we propose PreDi, a partitioning scheme that disentangles label-space heterogeneity into two orthogonal dimensions, namely class Prevalence and class-set size Disparity, enabling separate analysis of their effects. Guided by the resulting insights, we further propose PreP-WFL (Prevalence-based Personalized Weighted Federated Learning) to adaptively strengthen rare-class representations in low-prevalence scenarios. Extensive experiments show that SSFL consistently outperforms local-only training under both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. The pronounced heterogeneity in unlabeled data volume is associated with improved representation pre-training, whereas under label-space heterogeneity, prevalence dominates performance and disparity has a smaller effect. PreP-WFL effectively mitigates this degradation, with gains increasing as prevalence decreases. These findings provide a mechanistic basis for characterizing label-space heterogeneity in decentralized recognition systems.

comment: 22 pages, 9 figures

☆ Storing Less, Finding More: How Novelty Filtering Improves Cross-Modal Retrieval on Edge Cameras

Sherif Abdelwahab

Always-on edge cameras generate continuous video streams where redundant frames degrade cross-modal retrieval by crowding correct results out of top-k search. This paper presents a streaming retrieval architecture: an on-device epsilon-net filter retains only semantically novel frames, building a denoised embedding index; a cross-modal adapter and cloud re-ranker compensate for the compact encoder's weak alignment. A single-pass streaming filter outperforms offline alternatives (k-means, farthest-point, uniform, random) across eight vision-language models (8M-632M) on two egocentric datasets (AEA, EPIC-KITCHENS). Combined, the architecture reaches 45.6% Hit@5 on held-out data using an 8M on-device encoder at an estimated 2.7 mW.

comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables; supplementary video included as ancillary file

☆ BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel, Yan Shu, Angelos Zavras, Ioannis Papoutsis, Paolo Rota, Begüm Demir

Vision-langugage models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in computer vision (CV), yet their performance on remote sensing (RS) data remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, multi-sensor RS image-text datasets with diverse textual annotations. Existing datasets predominantly include aerial Red-Green-Blue imagery, with short or weakly grounded captions, and provide limited diversity in annotation types. To address this limitation, we introduce BigEarthNet.txt, a large-scale, multi-sensor image-text dataset designed to advance instruction-driven image-text learning in Earth observation across multiple tasks. BigEarthNet.txt contains 464044 co-registered Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 multispectral images with 9.6M text annotations, including: i) geographically anchored captions describing land-use/land-cover (LULC) classes, their spatial relations, and environmental context; ii) visual question answering pairs relevant for different tasks; and iii) referring expression detection instructions for bounding box prediction. Through a comparative statistical analysis, we demonstrate that BigEarthNet.txt surpasses existing RS image-text datasets in textual richness and annotation type variety. We further establish a manually-verified benchmark split to evaluate VLMs in RS and CV. The results show the limitations of these models on tasks that involve complex LULC classes, whereas fine-tuning using BigEarthNet.txt results in consistent performance gains across all considered tasks.

comment: For details, see https://txt.bigearth.net

☆ Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Shi-Xue Zhang, Zhengkai Jiang, Lucas Wang, Zhao Zhong, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

comment: Project Page: https://github.com/shawn0728/Unify-Agent

☆ Video-Oasis: Rethinking Evaluation of Video Understanding

Geuntaek Lim, Minho Shim, Sungjune Park, Jaeyun Lee, Inwoong Lee, Taeoh Kim, Dongyoon Wee, Yukyung Choi

The inherent complexity of video understanding makes it difficult to attribute whether performance gains stem from visual perception, linguistic reasoning, or knowledge priors. While many benchmarks have emerged to assess high-level reasoning, the essential criteria that constitute video understanding remain largely overlooked. Instead of introducing yet another benchmark, we take a step back to re-examine the current landscape of video understanding. In this work, we provide Video-Oasis, a sustainable diagnostic suite designed to systematically evaluate existing evaluations and distill spatio-temporal challenges for video understanding. Our analysis reveals two critical findings: (1) 54% of existing benchmark samples are solvable without visual input or temporal context, and (2) on the remaining samples, state-of-the-art models exhibit performance barely exceeding random guessing. To bridge this gap, we investigate which algorithmic design choices contribute to robust video understanding, providing practical guidelines for future research. We hope our work serves as a standard guideline for benchmark construction and the rigorous evaluation of architecture development. Code is available at https://github.com/sejong-rcv/Video-Oasis.

☆ FlowID : Enhancing Forensic Identification with Latent Flow-Matching Models

Jules Ripoll, David Bertoin, Alasdair Newson, Charles Dossal, Jose Pablo Baraybar

Every day, many people die under violent circumstances, whether from crimes, war, migration, or climate disasters. Medico-legal and law enforcement institutions document many portraits of the deceased for evidence, but cannot immediately carry out identification on them. While traditional image editing tools can process these photos for public release, the workflow is lengthy and produces suboptimal results. In this work, we leverage advances in image generation models, which can now produce photorealistic human portraits, to introduce FlowID, an identity-preserving facial reconstruction method. Our approach combines single-image fine-tuning, which adapts the generative model to out-of-distribution injured faces, with attention-based masking that localizes edits to damaged regions while preserving identity-critical features. Together, these components enable the removal of artifacts from violent death while retaining sufficient identity information to support identification. To evaluate our method, we introduce InjuredFaces, a novel benchmark for identity-preserving facial reconstruction under severe facial damage. Beyond serving as an evaluation tool for this work, InjuredFaces provides a standardized resource for the community to study and compare methods addressing facial reconstruction in extreme conditions. Experimental results show that FlowID outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods while maintaining low memory requirements, making it suitable for local deployment without compromising data privacy.

☆ Emotion Diffusion Classifier with Adaptive Margin Discrepancy Training for Facial Expression Recognition

Rongkang Dong, Cuixin Yang, Cong Zhang, Yushen Zuo, Kin-Man Lam

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is essential for human-machine interaction, as it enables machines to interpret human emotions and internal states from facial affective behaviors. Although deep learning has significantly advanced FER performance, most existing deep-learning-based FER methods rely heavily on discriminative classifiers for fast predictions. These models tend to learn shortcuts and are vulnerable to even minor distribution shifts. To address this issue, we adopt a conditional generative diffusion model and introduce the Emotion Diffusion Classifier (EmoDC) for FER, which demonstrates enhanced adversarial robustness. However, retraining EmoDC using standard strategies fails to penalize incorrect categorical descriptions, leading to suboptimal recognition performance. To improve EmoDC, we propose margin-based discrepancy training, which encourages accurate predictions when conditioned on correct categorical descriptions and penalizes predictions conditioned on mismatched ones. This method enforces a minimum margin between noise-prediction errors for correct and incorrect categories, thereby enhancing the model's discriminative capability. Nevertheless, using a fixed margin fails to account for the varying difficulty of noise prediction across different images, limiting its effectiveness. To overcome this limitation, we propose Adaptive Margin Discrepancy Training (AMDiT), which dynamically adjusts the margin for each sample. Extensive experiments show that AMDiT significantly improves the accuracy of EmoDC over the Base model with standard denoising diffusion training on the RAF-DB basic subset, the RAF-DB compound subset, SFEW-2.0, and AffectNet, in 100-step evaluations. Additionally, EmoDC outperforms state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers in terms of robustness against noise and blur.

☆ Generating Key Postures of Bharatanatyam Adavus with Pose Estimation

Jagadish Kashinath Kamble, Jayanta Mukhopadhyay, Debaditya Roy, Partha Pratim Das

Preserving intangible cultural dances rooted in centuries of tradition and governed by strict structural and symbolic rules presents unique challenges in the digital era. Among these, Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form, stands out for its emphasis on codified adavus and precise key postures. Accurately generating these postures is crucial not only for maintaining anatomical and stylistic integrity, but also for enabling effective documentation, analysis, and transmission to broader global audiences through digital means. We propose a pose-aware generative framework integrated with a pose estimation module, guided by keypoint-based loss and pose consistency constraints. These supervisory signals ensure anatomical accuracy and stylistic integrity in the synthesized outputs. We evaluate four configurations: standard conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), cGAN with pose supervision, conditional diffusion, and conditional diffusion with pose supervision. Each model is conditioned on key posture class labels and optimized to maintain geometric structure. In both cGAN and conditional diffusion settings, the integrated pose guidance aligns generated poses with ground-truth keypoint structures, promoting cultural fidelity. Our results demonstrate that incorporating pose supervision significantly enhances the quality, realism, and authenticity of generated Bharatanatyam postures. This framework provides a scalable approach for the digital preservation, education, and dissemination of traditional dance forms, enabling high-fidelity generation without compromising cultural precision. Code is available at https://github.com/jagidsh/Generating-Key-Postures-of-Bharatanatyam-Adavus-with-Pose-Estimation.

comment: Published in ICVGIP, 2025

☆ Quantization with Unified Adaptive Distillation to enable multi-LoRA based one-for-all Generative Vision Models on edge CVPR 2026

Sowmya Vajrala, Aakash Parmar, Prasanna R, Sravanth Kodavanti, Manjunath Arveti, Srinivas Soumitri Miriyala, Ashok Senapati

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) features such as image editing, object removal, and prompt-guided image transformation are increasingly integrated into mobile applications. However, deploying Large Vision Models (LVMs) for such tasks on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to their high memory and compute requirements. While Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) enable parameter-efficient task adaptation, existing Mobile deployment pipelines typically compile separate model binaries for each LoRA + a copy of the foundation model, resulting in redundant storage and increased runtime overhead. In this work, we present a unified framework for enabling multi-task GenAI inference on edge devices using a single shared model. Our key idea is to treat LoRA weights as runtime inputs rather than embedding them into the compiled model graph, allowing dynamic task switching at runtime without recompilation. Then, to support efficient on-device execution, we introduce QUAD (Quantization with Unified Adaptive Distillation), a quantizationaware training strategy that aligns multiple LoRA adapters under a shared quantization profile. We implement the proposed system with a lightweight runtime stack compatible with mobile NPUs and evaluate it across multiple chipsets. Experimental results demonstrate up to 6x and 4x reduction in memory footprint and latency improvements, respectively, while maintaining high visual quality across multiple GenAI tasks.

comment: Accepted at the Mobile AI Workshop, CVPR 2026

☆ Transmittance-Guided Structure-Texture Decomposition for Nighttime Image Dehazing

Francesco Moretti, Giulia Bianchi, Andrea Gallo

Nighttime images captured under hazy conditions suffer from severe quality degradation, including low visibility, color distortion, and reduced contrast, caused by the combined effects of atmospheric scattering, absorption by suspended particles, and non-uniform illumination from artificial light sources. While existing nighttime dehazing methods have achieved partial success, they typically address only a subset of these issues, such as glow suppression or brightness enhancement, without jointly tackling the full spectrum of degradation factors. In this paper, we propose a two-stage nighttime image dehazing framework that integrates transmittance correction with structure-texture layered optimization. In the first stage, we introduce a novel transmittance correction method that establishes boundary-constrained initial transmittance maps and subsequently applies region-adaptive compensation and normalization based on whether image regions correspond to light source areas. A quadratic Gaussian filtering scheme operating in the YUV color space is employed to estimate the spatially varying atmospheric light map. The corrected transmittance map and atmospheric light map are then used in conjunction with an improved nighttime imaging model to produce the initial dehazed image. In the second stage, we propose a STAR-YUV decomposition model that separates the dehazed image into structure and texture layers within the YUV color space. Gamma correction and MSRCR-based color restoration are applied to the structure layer for illumination compensation and color bias correction, while Laplacian-of-Gaussian filtering is applied to the texture layer for detail enhancement. A novel two-phase fusion strategy, comprising nonlinear Retinex-based fusion of the enhanced layers followed by linear blending with the initial dehazing result, yields the final output.

☆ All-in-One Augmented Reality Guided Head and Neck Tumor Resection

Yue Yang, Matthieu Chabanas, Carrie Reale, Annie Benson, Jason Slagle, Matthew Weinger, Michael Topf, Jie Ying Wu

Positive margins are common in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, yet intraoperative re-resection is often imprecise because margin locations are typically communicated verbally from pathology. We present an all-in-one augmented reality (AR) system that relocalizes positive margins from a resected specimen to the resection bed and visualizes them in situ using HoloLens 2 depth sensing and fully automated markerless surface registration. In a silicone phantom study with six medical trainees, markerless registration achieved target registration errors comparable to a marker-based baseline (median 1.8 mm vs. 1.7 mm; maximum < 4 mm). In a margin relocalization task, AR guidance reduced error from verbal guidance (median 14.2 mm) to a few millimeters (median 3.2 mm), with all AR localizations within 5 mm error. These results support the feasibility of markerless AR margin guidance for more precise intraoperative re-excision.

☆ VecAttention: Vector-wise Sparse Attention for Accelerating Long Context Inference CVPR 2026

Anmin Liu, Ruixuan Yang, Huiqiang Jiang, Bin Lin, Minmin Sun, Yong Li, Chen Zhang, Tao Xie

Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained patterns to improve efficiency, they typically incur redundant computation and suboptimal performance. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose \textbf{VecAttention}, a novel framework of vector-wise sparse attention that achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for video models. We observe that video attention maps exhibit a strong vertical-vector sparse pattern, and further demonstrate that this vertical-vector pattern offers consistently better accuracy-sparsity trade-offs compared with existing coarse-grained sparse patterns. Based on this observation, VecAttention dynamically selects and processes only informative vertical vectors through a lightweight important-vector selection that minimizes memory access overhead and an optimized kernel of vector sparse attention. Comprehensive evaluations on video understanding (VideoMME, LongVideoBench, and VCRBench) and generation (VBench) tasks show that VecAttention delivers a 2.65$\times$ speedup over full attention and a 1.83$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art sparse attention methods, with comparable accuracy to full attention. Our code is available at https://github.com/anminliu/VecAttention.

comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026

☆ Square Superpixel Generation and Representation Learning via Granular Ball Computing

Shuyin Xia, Meng Yang, Dawei Dai, Fan Chen, Shilin Zhao, Junwei Han, Xinbo Gao, Guoyin Wang, Wen Lu

Superpixels provide a compact region-based representation that preserves object boundaries and local structures, and have therefore been widely used in a variety of vision tasks to reduce computational cost. However, most existing superpixel algorithms produce irregularly shaped regions, which are not well aligned with regular operators such as convolutions. Consequently, superpixels are often treated as an offline preprocessing step, limiting parallel implementation and hindering end-to-end optimization within deep learning pipelines. Motivated by the adaptive representation and coverage property of granular-ball computing, we develop a square superpixel generation approach. Specifically, we approximate superpixels using multi-scale square blocks to avoid the computational and implementation difficulties induced by irregular shapes, enabling efficient parallel processing and learnable feature extraction. For each block, a purity score is computed based on pixel-intensity similarity, and high-quality blocks are selected accordingly. The resulting square superpixels can be readily integrated as graph nodes in graph neural networks (GNNs) or as tokens in Vision Transformers (ViTs), facilitating multi-scale information aggregation and structured visual representation. Experimental results on downstream tasks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

☆ FedDBP: Enhancing Federated Prototype Learning with Dual-Branch Features and Personalized Global Fusion

Ningzhi Gao, Siquan Huang, Leyu Shi, Ying Gao

Federated prototype learning (FPL), as a solution to heterogeneous federated learning (HFL), effectively alleviates the challenges of data and model heterogeneity.However, existing FPL methods fail to balance the fidelity and discriminability of the feature, and are limited by a single global prototype. In this paper, we propose FedDBP, a novel FPL method to address the above issues. On the client-side, we design a Dual-Branch feature projector that employs L2 alignment and contrastive learning simultaneously, thereby ensuring both the fidelity and discriminability of local features. On the server-side, we introduce a Personalized global prototype fusion approach that leverages Fisher information to identify the important channels of local prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedDBP over ten existing advanced methods.

☆ Few-shot Writer Adaptation via Multimodal In-Context Learning

Tom Simon, Stephane Nicolas, Pierrick Tranouez, Clement Chatelain, Thierry Paquet

While state-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models perform well on standard benchmarks, they frequently struggle with writers exhibiting highly specific styles that are underrepresented in the training data. To handle unseen and atypical writers, writer adaptation techniques personalize HTR models to individual handwriting styles. Leading writer adaptation methods require either offline fine-tuning or parameter updates at inference time, both involving gradient computation and backpropagation, which increase computational costs and demand careful hyperparameter tuning. In this work, we propose a novel context-driven HTR framework3 inspired by multimodal in-context learning, enabling inference-time writer adaptation using only a few examples from the target writer without any parameter updates. We further demonstrate the impact of context length, design a compact 8M-parameter CNN-Transformer that enables few-shot in-context adaptation, and show that combining context-driven and standard OCR training strategies leads to complementary improvements. Experiments on IAM and RIMES validate our approach with Character Error Rates of 3.92% and 2.34%, respectively, surpassing all writer-independent HTR models without requiring any parameter updates at inference time.

☆ NeoNet: An End-to-End 3D MRI-Based Deep Learning Framework for Non-Invasive Prediction of Perineural Invasion via Generation-Driven Classification AAAI 2026

Youngung Han, Minkyung Cha, Kyeonghun Kim, Induk Um, Myeongbin Sho, Joo Young Bae, Jaewon Jung, Jung Hyeok Park, Seojun Lee, Nam-Joon Kim, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Won Jae Lee, Pa Hong, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee

Minimizing invasive diagnostic procedures to reduce the risk of patient injury and infection is a central goal in medical imaging. And yet, noninvasive diagnosis of perineural invasion (PNI), a critical prognostic factor involving infiltration of tumor cells along the surrounding nerve, still remains challenging, due to the lack of clear and consistent imaging criteria criteria for identifying PNI. To address this challenge, we present NeoNet, an integrated end-to-end 3D deep learning framework for PNI prediction in cholangiocarcinoma that does not rely on predefined image features. NeoNet integrates three modules: (1) NeoSeg, utilizing a Tumor-Localized ROI Crop (TLCR) algorithm; (2) NeoGen, a 3D Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with ControlNet, conditioned on anatomical masks to generate synthetic image patches, specifically balancing the dataset to a 1:1 ratio; and (3) NeoCls, the final prediction module. For NeoCls, we developed the PNI-Attention Network (PattenNet), which uses the frozen LDM encoder and specialized 3D Dual Attention Blocks (DAB) designed to detect subtle intensity variations and spatial patterns indicative of PNI. In 5-fold cross-validation, NeoNet outperformed baseline 3D models and achieved the highest performance with a maximum AUC of 0.7903.

comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for oral presentation at W3PHIAI Workshop, AAAI 2026

☆ EarthEmbeddingExplorer: A Web Application for Cross-Modal Retrieval of Global Satellite Images ICLR 2026

Yijie Zheng, Weijie Wu, Bingyue Wu, Long Zhao, Guoqing Li, Mikolaj Czerkawski, Konstantin Klemmer

While the Earth observation community has witnessed a surge in high-impact foundation models and global Earth embedding datasets, a significant barrier remains in translating these academic assets into freely accessible tools. This tutorial introduces EarthEmbeddingExplorer, an interactive web application designed to bridge this gap, transforming static research artifacts into dynamic, practical workflows for discovery. We will provide a comprehensive hands-on guide to the system, detailing its cloud-native software architecture, demonstrating cross-modal queries (natural language, visual, and geolocation), and showcasing how to derive scientific insights from retrieval results. By democratizing access to precomputed Earth embeddings, this tutorial empowers researchers to seamlessly transition from state-of-the-art models and data archives to real-world application and analysis. The web application is available at https://modelscope.ai/studios/Major-TOM/EarthEmbeddingExplorer.

comment: ICLR 2026 Workshop ML4RS Tutorial Track (oral)

☆ Polyhedral Unmixing: Bridging Semantic Segmentation with Hyperspectral Unmixing via Polyhedral-Cone Partitioning

Antoine Bottenmuller, Etienne Decencière, Petr Dokládal

Semantic segmentation and hyperspectral unmixing are two central problems in spectral image analysis. The former assigns each pixel a discrete label corresponding to its material class, whereas the latter estimates pure material spectra, called endmembers, and, for each pixel, a vector representing material abundances in the observed scene. Despite their complementarity, these two problems are usually addressed independently. This paper aims to bridge these two lines of work by formally showing that, under the linear mixing model, pixel classification by dominant materials induces polyhedral-cone regions in the spectral space. We leverage this fundamental property to propose a direct segmentation-to-unmixing pipeline that performs blind hyperspectral unmixing from any semantic segmentation by constructing a polyhedral-cone partition of the space that best fits the labeled pixels. Signed distances from pixels to the estimated regions are then computed, linearly transformed via a change of basis in the distance space, and projected onto the probability simplex, yielding an initial abundance estimate. This estimate is used to extract endmembers and recover final abundances via matrix pseudo-inversion. Because the segmentation method can be freely chosen, the user gains explicit control over the unmixing process, while the rest of the pipeline remains essentially deterministic and lightweight. Beyond improving interpretability, experiments on three real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when associated with appropriate clustering algorithms, and show consistent improvements over recent deep and non-deep state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/antoine-bottenmuller/polyhedral-unmixing

☆ SeGPruner: Semantic-Geometric Visual Token Pruner for 3D Question Answering

Wenli Li, Kai Zhao, Haoran Jiang, Enquan Yang, Yi Su, Dan Zeng

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely adopted for 3D question answering (3D QA). In typical pipelines, visual tokens extracted from multiple viewpoints are concatenated with language tokens and jointly processed by a large language model (LLM) for inference. However, aggregating multi-view observations inevitably introduces severe token redundancy, leading to an overly large visual token set that significantly hinders inference efficiency under constrained token budgets. Visual token pruning has emerged as a prevalent strategy to address this issue. Nevertheless, most existing pruners are primarily tailored to 2D inputs or rely on indirect geometric cues, which limits their ability to explicitly retain semantically critical objects and maintain sufficient spatial coverage for robust 3D reasoning. In this paper, we propose SeGPruner, a semantic-aware and geometry-guided token reduction framework for efficient 3D QA with multi-view images. Specifically, SeGPruner first preserves semantically salient tokens through an attention-based importance module (Saliency-aware Token Selector), ensuring that object-critical evidence is retained. It then complements these tokens with spatially diverse ones via a geometry-guided selector (Geometry-aware Token Diversifier), which jointly considers semantic relevance and 3D geometric distance. This cooperation between saliency preservation and geometry-guided diversification balances object-level evidence and global scene coverage under aggressive token reduction. Extensive experiments on ScanQA and OpenEQA demonstrate that SeGPruner substantially improves inference efficiency, reducing the visual token budget by 91% and inference latency by 86%, while maintaining competitive performance in 3D reasoning tasks.

☆ Seeing the Evidence, Missing the Answer: Tool-Guided Vision-Language Models on Visual Illusions CVPR 2026

Xuesong Wang, Harry Wang

Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit a systematic bias when confronted with classic optical illusions: they overwhelmingly predict the illusion as "real" regardless of whether the image has been counterfactually modified. We present a tool-guided inference framework for the DataCV 2026 Challenge (Tasks I and II) that addresses this failure mode without any model training. An off-the-shelf vision-language model is given access to a small set of generic image manipulation tools: line drawing, region cropping, side-by-side comparison, and channel isolation, together with an illusion-type-routing system prompt that prescribes which tools to invoke for each perceptual question category. Critically, every tool call produces a new, immutable image resource appended to a persistent registry, so the model can reference and compose any prior annotated view throughout its reasoning chain. Rather than hard-coding illusion-specific modules, this generic-tool-plus-routing design yields strong cross-structural generalization: performance remained consistent from the validation set to a test set containing structurally unfamiliar illusion variants (e.g., Mach Bands rotated from vertical to horizontal stacking). We further report three empirical observations that we believe warrant additional investigation: (i) a strong positive-detection bias likely rooted in imbalanced illusion training data, (ii) a striking dissociation between pixel-accurate spatial reasoning and logical inference over self-generated annotations, and (iii) pronounced sensitivity to image compression artifacts that compounds false positives.

comment: CVPR 2026 DataCV Workshop, code: https://github.com/Davidxswang/cvpr_2026_datacv_submission

☆ A2BFR: Attribute-Aware Blind Face Restoration

Chenxin Zhu, Yushun Fang, Lu Liu, Shibo Yin, Xiaohong Liu, Xiaoyun Zhang, Qiang Hu, Guangtao Zhai

Blind face restoration (BFR) aims to recover high-quality facial images from degraded inputs, yet its inherently ill-posed nature leads to ambiguous and uncontrollable solutions. Recent diffusion-based BFR methods improve perceptual quality but remain uncontrollable, whereas text-guided face editing enables attribute manipulation without reliable restoration. To address these issues, we propose A$^2$BFR, an attribute-aware blind face restoration framework that unifies high-fidelity reconstruction with prompt-controllable generation. Built upon a Diffusion Transformer backbone with unified image-text cross-modal attention, A$^2$BFR jointly conditions the denoising trajectory on both degraded inputs and textual prompts. To inject semantic priors, we introduce attribute-aware learning, which supervises denoising latents using facial attribute embeddings extracted by an attribute-aware encoder. To further enhance prompt controllability, we introduce semantic dual-training, which leverages the pairwise attribute variations in our newly curated AttrFace-90K dataset to enforce attribute discrimination while preserving fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A$^2$BFR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both restoration fidelity and instruction adherence, outperforming diffusion-based BFR baselines by -0.0467 LPIPS and +52.58% attribute accuracy, while enabling fine-grained, prompt-controllable restoration even under severe degradations.

☆ Multimodal Models Meet Presentation Attack Detection on ID Documents

Marina Villanueva, Juan M. Espin, Juan E. Tapia

The integration of multimodal models into Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) for ID Documents represents a significant advancement in biometric security. Traditional PAD systems rely solely on visual features, which often fail to detect sophisticated spoofing attacks. This study explores the combination of visual and textual modalities by utilizing pre-trained multimodal models, such as Paligemma, Llava, and Qwen, to enhance the detection of presentation attacks on ID Documents. This approach merges deep visual embeddings with contextual metadata (e.g., document type, issuer, and date). However, experimental results indicate that these models struggle to accurately detect PAD on ID Documents.

☆ RAAP: Retrieval-Augmented Affordance Prediction with Cross-Image Action Alignment

Qiyuan Zhuang, He-Yang Xu, Yijun Wang, Xin-Yang Zhao, Yang-Yang Li, Xiu-Shen Wei

Understanding object affordances is essential for enabling robots to perform purposeful and fine-grained interactions in diverse and unstructured environments. However, existing approaches either rely on retrieval, which is fragile due to sparsity and coverage gaps, or on large-scale models, which frequently mislocalize contact points and mispredict post-contact actions when applied to unseen categories, thereby hindering robust generalization. We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Affordance Prediction (RAAP), a framework that unifies affordance retrieval with alignment-based learning. By decoupling static contact localization and dynamic action direction, RAAP transfers contact points via dense correspondence and predicts action directions through a retrieval-augmented alignment model that consolidates multiple references with dual-weighted attention. Trained on compact subsets of DROID and HOI4D with as few as tens of samples per task, RAAP achieves consistent performance across unseen objects and categories, and enables zero-shot robotic manipulation in both simulation and the real world. Project website: https://github.com/SEU-VIPGroup/RAAP.

comment: Accepted to ICRA 2026

☆ Adversarial Prompt Injection Attack on Multimodal Large Language Models

Meiwen Ding, Song Xia, Chenqi Kong, Xudong Jiang

Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their instruction-following behavior leaves them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. Existing prompt injection methods predominantly rely on textual prompts or perceptible visual prompts that are observable by human users. In this work, we study imperceptible visual prompt injection against powerful closed-source MLLMs, where adversarial instructions are embedded in the visual modality. Our method adaptively embeds the malicious prompt into the input image via a bounded text overlay to provide semantic guidance. Meanwhile, the imperceptible visual perturbation is iteratively optimized to align the feature representation of the attacked image with those of the malicious visual and textual targets at both coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, the visual target is instantiated as a text-rendered image and progressively refined during optimization to more faithfully represent the desired semantics and improve transferability. Extensive experiments on two multimodal understanding tasks across multiple closed-source MLLMs demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to existing methods.

☆ Native-Domain Cross-Attention for Camera-LiDAR Extrinsic Calibration Under Large Initial Perturbations

Ni Ou, Zhuo Chen, Xinru Zhang, Junzheng Wang

Accurate camera-LiDAR fusion relies on precise extrinsic calibration, which fundamentally depends on establishing reliable cross-modal correspondences under potentially large misalignments. Existing learning-based methods typically project LiDAR points into depth maps for feature fusion, which distorts 3D geometry and degrades performance when the extrinsic initialization is far from the ground truth. To address this issue, we propose an extrinsic-aware cross-attention framework that directly aligns image patches and LiDAR point groups in their native domains. The proposed attention mechanism explicitly injects extrinsic parameter hypotheses into the correspondence modeling process, enabling geometry-consistent cross-modal interaction without relying on projected 2D depth maps. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and robustness. Under large extrinsic perturbations, our approach achieves accurate calibration in 88% of KITTI cases and 99% of nuScenes cases, substantially surpassing the second-best baseline. We have open sourced our code on https://github.com/gitouni/ProjFusion to benefit the community.

comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

☆ AGFT: Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness of Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026

Yubo Cui, Xianchao Guan, Zijun Xiong, Zheng Zhang

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization but remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing classification-guided adversarial fine-tuning methods often disrupt pre-trained cross-modal alignment, weakening visual-textual correspondence and degrading zero-shot performance. In this paper, we propose an Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning (AGFT) framework that enhances zero-shot adversarial robustness while preserving the cross-modal semantic structure. Unlike label-based methods that rely on hard labels and fail to maintain the relative relationships between image and text, AGFT leverages the probabilistic predictions of the original model for text-guided adversarial training, which aligns adversarial visual features with textual embeddings via soft alignment distributions, improving zero-shot adversarial robustness. To address structural discrepancies introduced by fine-tuning, we introduce a distribution consistency calibration mechanism that adjusts the robust model output to match a temperature-scaled version of the pre-trained model predictions. Extensive experiments across multiple zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that AGFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving zero-shot adversarial robustness.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026; Code is available at \url{https://github.com/YuboCui/AGFT}

☆ Hallucination-aware intermediate representation edit in large vision-language models

Wei Suo, Hanzu Zhang, Lijun Zhang, Ji Ma, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang

Large Vision-Language Models have demonstrated exceptional performance in multimodal reasoning and complex scene understanding. However, these models still face significant hallucination issues, where outputs contradict visual facts. Recent research on hallucination mitigation has focused on retraining methods and Contrastive Decoding (CD) methods. While both methods perform well, retraining methods require substantial training resources, and CD methods introduce dual inference overhead. These factors hinder their practical applicability. To address the above issue, we propose a framework for dynamically detecting hallucination representations and performing hallucination-eliminating edits on these representations. With minimal additional computational cost, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its efficient and robust hallucination elimination capability and its powerful controllability over hallucinations. Code is available at https://github.com/ASGO-MM/HIRE

☆ AA-Splat: Anti-Aliased Feed-forward Gaussian Splatting

Taewoo Suh, Sungpyo Kim, Jongmin Park, Munchurl Kim

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (FF-3DGS) emerges as a fast and robust solution for sparse-view 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing FF-3DGS methods are built on incorrect screen-space dilation filters, causing severe rendering artifacts when rendering at out-of-distribution sampling rates. We firstly propose an FF-3DGS model, called AA-Splat, to enable robust anti-aliased rendering at any resolution. AA-Splat utilizes an opacity-balanced band-limiting (OBBL) design, which combines two components: a 3D band-limiting post-filter integrates multi-view maximal frequency bounds into the feed-forward reconstruction pipeline, effectively band-limiting the resulting 3D scene representations and eliminating degenerate Gaussians; an Opacity Balancing (OB) to seamlessly integrate all pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives into the rendering process, compensating for the increased overlap between expanded Gaussian primitives. AA-Splat demonstrates drastic improvements with average 5.4$\sim$7.5dB PSNR gains on NVS performance over a state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline, DepthSplat, at all resolutions, between $4\times$ and $1/4\times$. Code will be made available.

comment: Please visit our project page at https://kaist-viclab.github.io/aasplat-site/

☆ Extend3D: Town-Scale 3D Generation CVPR 2026

Seungwoo Yoon, Jinmo Kim, Jaesik Park

In this paper, we propose Extend3D, a training-free pipeline for 3D scene generation from a single image, built upon an object-centric 3D generative model. To overcome the limitations of fixed-size latent spaces in object-centric models for representing wide scenes, we extend the latent space in the $x$ and $y$ directions. Then, by dividing the extended latent space into overlapping patches, we apply the object-centric 3D generative model to each patch and couple them at each time step. Since patch-wise 3D generation with image conditioning requires strict spatial alignment between image and latent patches, we initialize the scene using a point cloud prior from a monocular depth estimator and iteratively refine occluded regions through SDEdit. We discovered that treating the incompleteness of 3D structure as noise during 3D refinement enables 3D completion via a concept, which we term under-noising. Furthermore, to address the sub-optimality of object-centric models for sub-scene generation, we optimize the extended latent during denoising, ensuring that the denoising trajectories remain consistent with the sub-scene dynamics. To this end, we introduce 3D-aware optimization objectives for improved geometric structure and texture fidelity. We demonstrate that our method yields better results than prior methods, as evidenced by human preference and quantitative experiments.

comment: CVPR 2026, Project Page: http://seungwoo-yoon.github.io/extend3d-page

☆ PromptForge-350k: A Large-Scale Dataset and Contrastive Framework for Prompt-Based AI Image Forgery Localization

Jianpeng Wang, Haoyu Wang, Baoying Chen, Jishen Zeng, Yiming Qin, Yiqi Yang, Zhongjie Ba

The rapid democratization of prompt-based AI image editing has recently exacerbated the risks associated with malicious content fabrication and misinformation. However, forgery localization methods targeting these emerging editing techniques remain significantly under-explored. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a fully automated mask annotating framework that leverages keypoint alignment and semantic space similarity to generate precise ground-truth masks for edited regions. Based on this framework, we construct PromptForge-350k, a large-scale forgery localization dataset covering four state-of-the-art prompt-based AI image editing models, thereby mitigating the data scarcity in this domain. Furthermore, we propose ICL-Net, an effective forgery localization network featuring a triple-stream backbone and intra-image contrastive learning. This design enables the model to capture highly robust and generalizable forensic features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an IoU of 62.5% on PromptForge-350k, outperforming SOTA methods by 5.1%. Additionally, it exhibits strong robustness against common degradations with an IoU drop of less than 1%, and shows promising generalization capabilities on unseen editing models, achieving an average IoU of 41.5%.

☆ Assessing Multimodal Chronic Wound Embeddings with Expert Triplet Agreement

Fabian Kabus, Julia Hindel, Jelena Bratulić, Meropi Karakioulaki, Ayush Gupta, Cristina Has, Thomas Brox, Abhinav Valada, Harald Binder

Recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB) is a rare genetic skin disorder for which clinicians greatly benefit from finding similar cases using images and clinical text. However, off-the-shelf foundation models do not reliably capture clinically meaningful features for this heterogeneous, long-tail disease, and structured measurement of agreement with experts is challenging. To address these gaps, we propose evaluating embedding spaces with expert ordinal comparisons (triplet judgments), which are fast to collect and encode implicit clinical similarity knowledge. We further introduce TriDerm, a multimodal framework that learns interpretable wound representations from small cohorts by integrating wound imagery, boundary masks, and expert reports. On the vision side, TriDerm adapts visual foundation models to RDEB using wound-level attention pooling and non-contrastive representation learning. For text, we prompt large language models with comparison queries and recover medically meaningful representations via soft ordinal embeddings (SOE). We show that visual and textual modalities capture complementary aspects of wound phenotype, and that fusing both modalities yields 73.5% agreement with experts, outperforming the best off-the-shelf single-modality foundation model by over 5.6 percentage points. We make the expert annotation tool, model code and representative dataset samples publicly available.

☆ StereoVGGT: A Training-Free Visual Geometry Transformer for Stereo Vision

Ziyang Chen, Yansong Qu, You Shen, Xuan Cheng, Liujuan Cao

Driven by the advancement of 3D devices, stereo vision tasks including stereo matching and stereo conversion have emerged as a critical research frontier. Contemporary stereo vision backbones typically rely on either monocular depth estimation (MDE) models or visual foundation models (VFMs). Crucially, these models are predominantly pretrained without explicit supervision of camera poses. Given that such geometric knowledge is indispensable for stereo vision, the absence of explicit spatial constraints constitutes a significant performance bottleneck for existing architectures. Recognizing that the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) operates as a foundation model pretrained on extensive 3D priors, including camera poses, we investigate its potential as a robust backbone for stereo vision tasks. Nevertheless, empirical results indicate that its direct application to stereo vision yields suboptimal performance. We observe that VGGT suffers from a more significant degradation of geometric details during feature extraction. Such characteristics conflict with the requirements of binocular stereo vision, thereby constraining its efficacy for relative tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose StereoVGGT, a feature backbone specifically tailored for stereo vision. By leveraging the frozen VGGT and introducing a training-free feature adjustment pipeline, we mitigate geometric degradation and harness the latent camera calibration knowledge embedded within the model. StereoVGGT-based stereo matching network achieved the $1^{st}$ rank among all published methods on the KITTI benchmark, validating that StereoVGGT serves as a highly effective backbone for stereo vision.

☆ Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction: A Unified Framework Harnessing Positional and Semantic Uncertainties

Jintao Sun, Hu Zhang, Gangyi Ding, Zhedong Zheng

Trajectory prediction seeks to forecast the future motion of dynamic entities, such as vehicles and pedestrians, given a temporal horizon of historical movement data and environmental context. A central challenge in this domain is the inherent uncertainty in real-time maps, arising from two primary sources: (1) positional inaccuracies due to sensor limitations or environmental occlusions, and (2) semantic errors stemming from misinterpretations of scene context. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified framework that jointly models positional and semantic uncertainties and explicitly integrates them into the trajectory prediction pipeline. Our approach employs a dual-head architecture to independently estimate semantic and positional predictions in a dual-pass manner, deriving prediction variances as uncertainty indicators in an end-to-end fashion. These uncertainties are subsequently fused with the semantic and positional predictions to enhance the robustness of trajectory forecasts. We evaluate our uncertainty-aware framework on the nuScenes real-world driving dataset, conducting extensive experiments across four map estimation methods and two trajectory prediction baselines. Results verify that our method (1) effectively quantifies map uncertainties through both positional and semantic dimensions, and (2) consistently improves the performance of existing trajectory prediction models across multiple metrics, including minimum Average Displacement Error (minADE), minimum Final Displacement Error (minFDE), and Miss Rate (MR). Code will available at https://github.com/JT-Sun/UATP.

comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables

☆ CIPHER: Counterfeit Image Pattern High-level Examination via Representation

Kyeonghun Kim, Youngung Han, Seoyoung Ju, Yeonju Jean, YooHyun Kim, Minseo Choi, SuYeon Lim, Kyungtae Park, Seungwoo Baek, Sieun Hyeon, Nam-Joon Kim, Hyuk-Jae Lee

The rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models has enabled the creation of synthetic faces that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real images. This progress, however, has also amplified the risks of misinformation, fraud, and identity abuse, underscoring the urgent need for detectors that remain robust across diverse generative models. In this work, we introduce Counterfeit Image Pattern High-level Examination via Representation(CIPHER), a deepfake detection framework that systematically reuses and fine-tunes discriminators originally trained for image generation. By extracting scale-adaptive features from ProGAN discriminators and temporal-consistency features from diffusion models, CIPHER captures generation-agnostic artifacts that conventional detectors often overlook. Through extensive experiments across nine state-of-the-art generative models, CIPHER demonstrates superior cross-model detection performance, achieving up to 74.33% F1-score and outperforming existing ViT-based detectors by over 30% in F1-score on average. Notably, our approach maintains robust performance on challenging datasets where baseline methods fail, with up to 88% F1-score on CIFAKE compared to near-zero performance from conventional detectors. These results validate the effectiveness of discriminator reuse and cross-model fine-tuning, establishing CIPHER as a promising approach toward building more generalizable and robust deepfake detection systems in an era of rapidly evolving generative technologies.

comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at IEEE-Asia 2025

☆ FOSCU: Feasibility of Synthetic MRI Generation via Duo-Diffusion Models for Enhancement of 3D U-Nets in Hepatic Segmentation

Youngung Han, Kyeonghun Kim, Seoyoung Ju, Yeonju Jean, Minkyung Cha, Seohyoung Park, Hyeonseok Jung, Nam-Joon Kim, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee

Medical image segmentation faces fundamental challenges including restricted access, costly annotation, and data shortage to clinical datasets through Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). These systemic barriers significantly impede the development of robust segmentation algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose FOSCU, which integrates Duo-Diffusion, a 3D latent diffusion model with ControlNet that simultaneously generates high-resolution, anatomically realistic synthetic MRI volumes and corresponding segmentation labels, and an enhanced 3D U-Net training pipeline. Duo-Diffusion employs segmentation-conditioned diffusion to ensure spatial consistency and precise anatomical detail in the generated data. Experimental evaluation on 720 abdominal MRI scans shows that models trained with combined real and synthetic data yield a mean Dice score gain of 0.67% over those using only real data, and achieve a 36.4% reduction in Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), reflecting enhanced image fidelity.

comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Accepted at IEEE APCCAS 2025

♻ ☆ Efficient Universal Perception Encoder

Chenchen Zhu, Saksham Suri, Cijo Jose, Maxime Oquab, Marc Szafraniec, Wei Wen, Yunyang Xiong, Patrick Labatut, Piotr Bojanowski, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra

Running AI models on smart edge devices can unlock versatile user experiences, but presents challenges due to limited compute and the need to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. This requires a vision encoder with small size but powerful and versatile representations. We present our method, Efficient Universal Perception Encoder (EUPE), which offers both inference efficiency and universally good representations for diverse downstream tasks. We achieve this by distilling from multiple domain-expert foundation vision encoders. Unlike previous agglomerative methods that directly scale down from multiple teachers to an efficient encoder, we demonstrate the importance of first scaling up to a large proxy teacher and then scaling down from this single teacher. Experiments show that EUPE achieves on-par or better performance than individual domain experts of the same size on diverse task domains and also outperforms previous agglomerative encoders. We release the full family of EUPE models and the code to foster future research.

comment: Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/EUPE; Model: https://huggingface.co/collections/facebook/eupe

♻ ☆ Gaze Authentication: Factors Influencing Authentication Performance

Dillon Lohr, Michael J Proulx, Mehedi Hasan Raju, Oleg V Komogortsev

This paper examines the key factors that influence the performance of state-of-the-art gaze-based authentication. Experiments were conducted on a large-scale, in-house dataset comprising 8,849 subjects collected with Meta Quest Pro equivalent hardware running a video oculography-driven gaze estimation pipeline at 72~Hz. State of the neural network architecture was employed to study the influence of the following factors on authentication performance: eye tracking signal quality, various aspects of eye tracking calibration, and simple filtering on estimated raw gaze. This report provides performance results and their analysis.

comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 10 tables

♻ ☆ GenOL: Generating Diverse Examples for Name-only Online Learning

Minhyuk Seo, Seongwon Cho, Minjae Lee, Diganta Misra, Hyeonbeom Choi, Seon Joo Kim, Jonghyun Choi

Online learning methods often rely on supervised data. However, under data distribution shifts, such as in continual learning (CL), where continuously arriving online data streams incorporate new concepts (e.g., classes), real-time manual annotation is impractical due to its costs and latency, which hinder real-time adaptation. To alleviate this, 'name-only' setup has been proposed, requiring only the name of concepts, not the supervised samples. A recent approach tackles this setup by supplementing data with web-scraped images, but such data often suffers from issues of data imbalance, noise, and copyright. To overcome the limitations of both human supervision and webly supervision, we propose GenOL using generative models for name-only training. But naive application of generative models results in limited diversity of generated data. Here, we enhance (i) intra-diversity, the diversity of images generated by a single model, by proposing a diverse prompt generation method that generates diverse text prompts for text-to-image models, and (ii) inter-diversity, the diversity of images generated by multiple generative models, by introducing an ensemble strategy that selects minimally overlapping samples. We empirically validate that the proposed \frameworkname outperforms prior arts, even a model trained with fully supervised data by large margins, in various tasks, including image recognition and multi-modal visual reasoning.

comment: TMLR 2025

♻ ☆ MathGen: Revealing the Illusion of Mathematical Competence through Text-to-Image Generation

Ruiyao Liu, Hui Shen, Ping Zhang, Yunta Hsieh, Yifan Zhang, Jing Xu, Sicheng Chen, Junchen Li, Jiawei Lu, Jianing Ma, Jiaqi Mo, Qi Han, Zhen Zhang, Zhongwei Wan, Jing Xiong, Xin Wang, Ziyuan Liu, Hangrui Cao, Ngai Wong

Modern generative models have demonstrated the ability to solve challenging mathematical problems. In many real-world settings, however, mathematical solutions must be expressed visually through diagrams, plots, geometric constructions, and structured symbolic layouts, where correctness depends on precise visual composition. This naturally raises the question of whether generative models can still do so when the answer must be rendered visually rather than written in text? To study this problem, we introduce MathGen, a rigorous benchmark of 900 problems spanning seven core domains, each paired with an executable verifier under a Script-as-a-Judge protocol for deterministic and objective evaluation. Experiments on representative open-source and proprietary text-to-image models show that mathematical fidelity remains a major bottleneck: even the best closed-source model reaches only 42.0% overall accuracy, while open-source models achieve just ~ 1-11%, often near 0% on structured tasks. Overall, current T2I models remain far from competent at even elementary mathematical visual generation.

♻ ☆ ReDiPrune: Relevance-Diversity Pre-Projection Token Pruning for Efficient Multimodal LLMs

An Yu, Ting Yu Tsai, Zhenfei Zhang, Weiheng Lu, Felix X. -F. Ye, Ming-Ching Chang

Recent multimodal large language models are computationally expensive because Transformers must process a large number of visual tokens. We present ReDiPrune, a training-free token pruning method applied before the vision-language projector, where visual features remain rich and discriminative. Unlike post-projection pruning methods that operate on compressed representations, ReDiPrune selects informative tokens directly from vision encoder outputs, preserving fine-grained spatial and semantic cues. Each token is scored by a lightweight rule that jointly consider text-conditioned relevance and max-min diversity, ensuring the selected tokens are both query-relevant and non-redundant. ReDiPrune is fully plug-and-play, requiring no retraining or architectural modifications, and can be seamlessly inserted between the encoder and projector. Across four video and five image benchmarks, it consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. For example, on EgoSchema with LLaVA-NeXT-Video-7B, retaining only 15% of visual tokens yields a +2.0% absolute accuracy gain while reducing computation by more than $6\times$ in TFLOPs. Code is available at https://github.com/UA-CVML/ReDiPrune.

♻ ☆ DiffusionVL: Translating Any Autoregressive Models into Diffusion Vision Language Models

Lunbin Zeng, Jingfeng Yao, Bencheng Liao, Hongyuan Tao, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang

Diffusion-based decoding has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering the potential to update multiple tokens in parallel and reduce latency. However, diffusion vision language models (dVLMs) still lag significantly behind mainstream autoregressive vision language models. This is due to the scarcity and weaker performance of base diffusion language models (dLLMs) compared with their autoregressive counterparts. This raises a natural question: Can we build high-performing dVLMs directly from existing powerful AR models, without relying on dLLMs? We propose DiffusionVL, a family of dVLMs obtained by translating pretrained AR models into the diffusion paradigm via an efficient diffusion finetuning procedure that changes the training objective and decoding process while keeping the backbone architecture intact. Through an efficient diffusion finetuning strategy, we successfully adapt AR pretrained models into the diffusion paradigm. This approach yields two key observations: (1) The paradigm shift from AR-based multimodal models to diffusion is remarkably effective. (2) Direct conversion of an AR language model to a dVLM is also feasible, achieving performance comparable to that of the same AR model finetuned with standard autoregressive visual instruction tuning. To enable practical open-ended generation, we further integrate block decoding, which supports arbitrary-length outputs and KV-cache reuse for faster inference. Our experiments demonstrate that despite training with less than 5% of the data required by prior methods, DiffusionVL achieves a comprehensive performance improvement, with a 34.4% gain on the MMMU-Pro (vision) benchmark and 37.5% gain on the MME (Cog.) benchmark, alongside a 2x inference speedup. The model and code are released at https://github.com/hustvl/DiffusionVL.

comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, conference or other essential info

♻ ☆ LPNSR: Prior-Enhanced Diffusion Image Super-Resolution via LR-Guided Noise Prediction

Shuwei Huang, Shizhuo Liu, Zijun Wei

Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR), which aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from corresponding low-resolution (LR) observations, faces a fundamental trade-off between inference efficiency and reconstruction quality. The state-of-the-art residual-shifting diffusion framework achieves efficient 4-step inference, yet suffers from severe performance degradation in compact sampling trajectories. This is mainly attributed to two core limitations: the inherent suboptimality of unconstrained random Gaussian noise in intermediate steps, which leads to error accumulation and insufficient LR prior guidance, and the initialization bias caused by naive bicubic upsampling. In this paper, we propose LPNSR, a prior-enhanced efficient diffusion framework to address these issues. We first mathematically derive the closed-form analytical solution of the optimal intermediate noise for the residual-shifting diffusion paradigm, and accordingly design an LR-guided multi-input-aware noise predictor to replace random Gaussian noise, embedding LR structural priors into the reverse process while fully preserving the framework's core efficient residual-shifting mechanism. We further mitigate initial bias with a high-quality pre-upsampling network to optimize the diffusion starting point. With a compact 4-step trajectory, LPNSR can be optimized in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LPNSR achieves state-of-the-art perceptual performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, without relying on any large-scale text-to-image priors. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/Faze-Hsw/LPNSR.

♻ ☆ Unsupervised Modular Adaptive Region Growing and RegionMix Classification for Wind Turbine Segmentation

Raül Pérez-Gonzalo, Riccardo Magro, Andreas Espersen, Antonio Agudo

Reliable operation of wind turbines requires frequent inspections, as even minor surface damages can degrade aerodynamic performance, reduce energy output, and accelerate blade wear. Central to automating these inspections is the accurate segmentation of turbine blades from visual data. This task is traditionally addressed through dense, pixel-wise deep learning models. However, such methods demand extensive annotated datasets, posing scalability challenges. In this work, we introduce an annotation-efficient segmentation approach that reframes the pixel-level task into a binary region classification problem. Image regions are generated using a fully unsupervised, interpretable Modular Adaptive Region Growing technique, guided by image-specific Adaptive Thresholding and enhanced by a Region Merging process that consolidates fragmented areas into coherent segments. To improve generalization and classification robustness, we introduce RegionMix, an augmentation strategy that synthesizes new training samples by combining distinct regions. Our framework demonstrates state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy and strong cross-site generalization by consistently segmenting turbine blades across distinct windfarms.

comment: Accepted to WACV 2026

♻ ☆ SceneDiff: A Benchmark and Method for Multiview Object Change Detection

Yuqun Wu, Chih-hao Lin, Henry Che, Aditi Tiwari, Chuhang Zou, Shenlong Wang, Derek Hoiem

We investigate the problem of identifying objects that have been added, removed, or moved between a pair of captures (images or videos) of the same scene at different times. Accurately identifying verifiable changes is extremely challenging -- some objects may appear to be missing because they are occluded or out of frame, while others may appear different due to large viewpoint changes. To study this problem, we introduce the SceneDiff Benchmark, the first multiview change detection dataset for scenes captured along different camera trajectories, comprising 350 diverse video pairs with dense object instance-level annotations. We also introduce the SceneDiff algorithm, a training-free approach that solves for image poses, segments images into objects, and compares them using semantic and geometric features. By building on pretrained models, SceneDiff generalizes across domains without retraining and naturally improves as the underlying models advance. Experiments on multiview and two-view benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches by large margins (53.0\% and 30.6\% relative AP improvements). Project page: https://yuqunw.github.io/SceneDiff

♻ ☆ SIMPACT: Simulation-Enabled Action Planning using Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026

Haowen Liu, Shaoxiong Yao, Haonan Chen, Jiawei Gao, Jiayuan Mao, Jia-Bin Huang, Yilun Du

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable common-sense and semantic reasoning capabilities. However, they lack a grounded understanding of physical dynamics. This limitation arises from training VLMs on static internet-scale visual-language data that contain no causal interactions or action-conditioned changes. Consequently, it remains challenging to leverage VLMs for fine-grained robotic manipulation tasks that require physical understanding, reasoning, and corresponding action planning. To overcome this, we present SIMPACT, a test-time, SIMulation-enabled ACTion Planning framework that equips VLMs with physical reasoning through simulation-in-the-loop world modeling, without requiring any additional training. From a single RGB-D observation, SIMPACT efficiently constructs physics simulations, enabling the VLM to propose informed actions, observe simulated rollouts, and iteratively refine its reasoning. By integrating language reasoning with physics prediction, our simulation-enabled VLM can understand contact dynamics and action outcomes in a physically grounded way. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on five challenging, real-world rigid-body and deformable manipulation tasks that require fine-grained physical reasoning, outperforming existing general-purpose robotic manipulation models. Our results demonstrate that embedding physics understanding via efficient simulation into VLM reasoning at test time offers a promising path towards generalizable embodied intelligence. Project webpage can be found at https://simpact-bot.github.io

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026; camera-ready version

♻ ☆ ReCALL: Recalibrating Capability Degradation for MLLM-based Composed Image Retrieval CVPR 2026

Tianyu Yang, Chenwei He, Xiangzhao Hao, Tianyue Wang, Jiarui Guo, Haiyun Guo, Leigang Qu, Jinqiao Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images based on a hybrid query comprising a reference image and a modification text. Early dual-tower Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with cross-modality compositional reasoning required for this task. While adapting generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for retrieval offers a promising direction, we identify that this strategy overlooks a fundamental issue: compressing a generative MLLM into a single-embedding discriminative retriever triggers a paradigm conflict, which leads to Capability Degradation - the deterioration of native fine-grained reasoning after retrieval adaptation. To address this challenge, we propose ReCALL, a model-agnostic framework that follows a diagnose-generate-refine pipeline: First, we diagnose cognitive blind spots of the retriever via self-guided informative instance mining. Next, we generate corrective instructions and triplets by prompting the foundation MLLM and conduct quality control with VQA-based consistency filtering. Finally, we refine the retriever through continual training on these triplets with a grouped contrastive scheme, thereby internalizing fine-grained visual-semantic distinctions and realigning the discriminative embedding space of retriever with intrinsic compositional reasoning within the MLLM. Extensive experiments on CIRR and FashionIQ show that ReCALL consistently recalibrates degraded capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/RemRico/Recall.

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ TransFIRA: Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment

Allen Tu, Kartik Narayan, Joshua Gleason, Jennifer Xu, Matthew Meyn, Tom Goldstein, Vishal M. Patel

Face recognition in unconstrained environments such as surveillance, video, and web imagery must contend with extreme variation in pose, blur, illumination, and occlusion, where conventional visual quality metrics fail to predict whether inputs are truly recognizable to the deployed encoder. Existing FIQA methods typically rely on visual heuristics, curated annotations, or computationally intensive generative pipelines, leaving their predictions detached from the encoder's decision geometry. We introduce TransFIRA (Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment), a lightweight and annotation-free framework that grounds recognizability directly in embedding space. TransFIRA delivers three advances: (i) a definition of recognizability via class-center similarity (CCS) and class-center angular separation (CCAS), yielding the first natural, decision-boundary-aligned criterion for filtering and weighting; (ii) a recognizability-informed aggregation strategy that achieves state-of-the-art verification accuracy on BRIAR and IJB-C while nearly doubling correlation with true recognizability, all without external labels, heuristics, or backbone-specific training; and (iii) new extensions beyond faces, including encoder-grounded explainability that reveals how degradations and subject-specific factors affect recognizability, and the first method for body recognizability assessment. Experiments confirm state-of-the-art results on faces, strong performance on body recognition, and robustness under cross-dataset shifts and out-of-distribution evaluation. Together, these contributions establish TransFIRA as a unified, geometry-driven framework for recognizability assessment that is encoder-specific, accurate, interpretable, and extensible across modalities, significantly advancing FIQA in accuracy, explainability, and scope.

comment: Project Page: https://transfira.github.io/

♻ ☆ LG-HCC: Local Geometry-Aware Hierarchical Context Compression for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Xuan Deng, Xiandong Meng, Hengyu Man, Qiang Zhu, Tiange Zhang, Debin Zhao, Xiaopeng Fan

Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity real-time rendering, its prohibitive storage overhead severely hinders practical deployment. Recent anchor-based 3DGS compression schemes reduce gaussina redundancy through ome advanced context models. However, overlook explicit geometric dependencies, leading to structural degradation and suboptimal rate-distortion performance. In this paper, we propose LG-HCC, a geometry-aware 3DGS compression framework that incorporates inter-anchor geometric correlations into anchor pruning and entropy coding for compact representation. Specifically, we introduce an Neighborhood-Aware Anchor Pruning (NAAP) strategy, which evaluates anchor importance via weighted neighborhood feature aggregation and merges redundant anchors into salient neighbors, yielding a compact yet geometry-consistent anchor set. Building upon this optimized structure, we further develop a hierarchical entropy coding scheme, in which coarse-to-fine priors are exploited through a lightweight Geometry-Guided Convolution (GG-Conv) operator to enable spatially adaptive context modeling and rate-distortion optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LG-HCC effectively resolves the structure preservation bottleneck, maintaining superior geometric integrity and rendering fidelity over state-of-the-art anchor-based compression approaches.

comment: 10

♻ ☆ CLIP-AUTT: Test-Time Personalization with Action Unit Prompting for Fine-Grained Video Emotion Recognition

Muhammad Osama Zeeshan, Masoumeh Sharafi, Benoît Savary, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger

Personalization in emotion recognition (ER) is essential for an accurate interpretation of subtle and subject-specific expressive patterns. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate strong potential for leveraging joint image-text representations in ER. However, CLIP-based methods either depend on CLIP's contrastive pretraining or on LLMs to generate descriptive text prompts, which are noisy, computationally expensive, and fail to capture fine-grained expressions, leading to degraded performance. In this work, we leverage Action Units (AUs) as structured textual prompts within CLIP to model fine-grained facial expressions. AUs encode the subtle muscle activations underlying expressions, providing localized and interpretable semantic cues for more robust ER. We introduce CLIP-AU, a lightweight AU-guided temporal learning method that integrates interpretable AU semantics into CLIP. It learns generic, subject-agnostic representations by aligning AU prompts with facial dynamics, enabling fine-grained ER without CLIP fine-tuning or LLM-generated text supervision. Although CLIP-AU models fine-grained AU semantics, it does not adapt to subject-specific variability in subtle expressions. To address this limitation, we propose CLIP-AUTT, a video-based test-time personalization method that dynamically adapts AU prompts to videos from unseen subjects. By combining entropy-guided temporal window selection with prompt tuning, CLIP-AUTT enables subject-specific adaptation while preserving temporal consistency. Our extensive experiments on three challenging video-based subtle ER datasets, BioVid, StressID, and BAH, indicate that CLIP-AU and CLIP-AUTT outperform state-of-the-art CLIP-based FER and TTA methods, achieving robust and personalized subtle ER. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/osamazeeshan/CLIP-AUTT.

♻ ☆ LatentFM: A Latent Flow Matching Approach for Generative Medical Image Segmentation

Huynh Trinh Ngoc, Hoang Anh Nguyen Kim, Toan Nguyen Hai, Long Tran Quoc

Generative models have achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of flow matching (FM). It has demonstrated strong generative capabilities and attracted significant attention as a simulation-free flow-based framework capable of learning exact data densities. Motivated by these advances, we propose LatentFM, a flow-based model operating in the latent space for medical image segmentation. To model the data distribution, we first design two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to encode both medical images and their corresponding masks into a lower-dimensional latent space. We then estimate a conditional velocity field that guides the flow based on the input image. By sampling multiple latent representations, our method synthesizes diverse segmentation outputs whose pixel-wise variance reliably captures the underlying data distribution, enabling both highly accurate and uncertainty-aware predictions. Furthermore, we generate confidence maps that quantify the model certainty, providing clinicians with richer information for deeper analysis. We conduct experiments on two datasets, ISIC-2018 and CVC-Clinic, and compare our method with several prior baselines, including both deterministic and generative approach models. Through comprehensive evaluations, both qualitative and quantitative results show that our approach achieves superior segmentation accuracy while remaining highly efficient in the latent space.

♻ ☆ InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models

Hongyuan Tao, Bencheng Liao, Shaoyu Chen, Haoran Yin, Qian Zhang, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly tasked with ultra-long multimodal understanding. While linear architectures offer constant computation and memory footprints, they often struggle with high-frequency visual perception compared to standard Transformers. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{InfiniteVL}. We first develop a hybrid base model called \textbf{InfiniteVL-Base} that interleaves a small fraction of Full Attention layers with Gated DeltaNet. Empowered by a tailored distillation and fine-tuning strategy, InfiniteVL-Base matches the fundamental multimodal performance of equivalent Transformers while achieving a \textbf{1.7$\times$} decoding speedup. However, the quadratic complexity of the retained Full Attention inevitably becomes an efficiency bottleneck when scaling to ultra long context. To break this barrier, we propose a novel Long-Sequence Architectural Fine-Tuning strategy that seamlessly transforms the dense attention into vision-specific sparse mechanisms. This yields two specialized variants: \textbf{InfiniteVL-Offline} for offline retrieval and \textbf{InfiniteVL-Online} for online streaming. By eliminating the computation explosion of global attention without sacrificing high-frequency visual recall, InfiniteVL-Offline achieves Transformer-level length generalization with a \textbf{5x} prefill acceleration at 256K context. Concurrently, InfiniteVL-Online delivers robust streaming perception with a constant memory footprint and a real-time throughput of \textbf{25} FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.

comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, conference or other essential info

♻ ☆ ResAdapt: Adaptive Resolution for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Huanxuan Liao, Zhongtao Jiang, Yupu Hao, Yuqiao Tan, Shizhu He, Ben Wang, Jun Zhao, Kun Xu, Kang Liu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve stronger visual understanding by scaling input fidelity, yet the resulting visual token growth makes jointly sustaining high spatial resolution and long temporal context prohibitive. We argue that the bottleneck lies not in how post-encoding representations are compressed but in the volume of pixels the encoder receives, and address it with ResAdapt, an Input-side adaptation framework that learns how much visual budget each frame should receive before encoding. ResAdapt couples a lightweight Allocator with an unchanged MLLM backbone, so the backbone retains its native visual-token interface while receiving an operator-transformed input. We formulate allocation as a contextual bandit and train the Allocator with Cost-Aware Policy Optimization (CAPO), which converts sparse rollout feedback into a stable accuracy-cost learning signal. Across budget-controlled video QA, temporal grounding, and image reasoning tasks, ResAdapt improves low-budget operating points and often lies on or near the efficiency-accuracy frontier, with the clearest gains on reasoning-intensive benchmarks under aggressive compression. Notably, ResAdapt supports up to 16x more frames at the same visual budget while delivering over 15% performance gain. Code is available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/ResAdapt.

comment: work in progress

♻ ☆ DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching

Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Shuai Chen, Jingbo Wang, Zhijun Li, Haoang Li

Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme are increasingly adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent iterations, so early token errors cannot be effectively corrected later. We propose DFM-VLA, a discrete flow matching VLA for iterative refinement of action tokens. DFM-VLA~models a token-level probability velocity field that dynamically updates the full action sequence across refinement iterations. We investigate two ways to construct the velocity field: an auxiliary velocity-head formulation and an action-embedding-guided formulation. Our framework further adopts a two-stage decoding strategy with an iterative refinement stage followed by deterministic validation for stable convergence. Extensive experiments on CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-world manipulation tasks show that DFM-VLA consistently outperforms strong autoregressive, discrete diffusion, and continuous diffusion baselines in manipulation performance while retaining high inference efficiency. In particular, DFM-VLA achieves an average success length of 4.44 on CALVIN and an average success rate of 95.7\% on LIBERO, highlighting the value of action refinement via discrete flow matching for robotic manipulation. Our project is available https://chris1220313648.github.io/DFM-VLA/

♻ ☆ Understanding vs. Generation: Navigating Optimization Dilemma in Multimodal Models ICLR2026

Sen Ye, Mengde Xu, Shuyang Gu, Di He, Liwei Wang, Han Hu

Current research in multimodal models faces a key challenge where enhancing generative capabilities often comes at the expense of understanding, and vice versa. We analyzed this trade-off and identify the primary cause might be the potential conflict between generation and understanding, which creates a competitive dynamic within the model. To address this, we propose the Reason-Reflect-Refine (R3) framework. This innovative algorithm re-frames the single-step generation task into a multi-step process of "generate-understand-regenerate". By explicitly leveraging the model's understanding capability during generation, we successfully mitigate the optimization dilemma, achieved stronger generation results and improved understanding ability which are related to the generation process. This offers valuable insights for designing next-generation unified multimodal models. Code is available at https://github.com/sen-ye/R3.

comment: Accepted to ICLR2026

♻ ☆ Benchmarking Physics-Informed Time-Series Models for Operational Global Station Weather Forecasting

Tao Han, Zhibin Wen, Zhenghao Chen, Dazhao Du, Song Guo, Lei Bai

The development of Time-Series Forecasting (TSF) models is often constrained by the lack of comprehensive datasets, especially in Global Station Weather Forecasting (GSWF), where existing datasets are small, temporally short, and spatially sparse. To address this, we introduce WEATHER-5K, a large-scale observational weather dataset that better reflects real-world conditions, supporting improved model training and evaluation. While recent TSF methods perform well on benchmarks, they lag behind operational Numerical Weather Prediction systems in capturing complex weather dynamics and extreme events. We propose PhysicsFormer, a physics-informed forecasting model combining a dynamic core with a Transformer residual to predict future weather states. Physical consistency is enforced via pressure-wind alignment and energy-aware smoothness losses, ensuring plausible dynamics while capturing complex temporal patterns. We benchmark PhysicsFormer and other TSF models against operational systems across several weather variables, extreme event prediction, and model complexity, providing a comprehensive assessment of the gap between academic TSF models and operational forecasting. The dataset and benchmark implementation are available at: https://github.com/taohan10200/WEATHER-5K.

comment: 34 pages, 20 figures

♻ ☆ $R_\text{dm}$: Re-conceptualizing Distribution Matching as a Reward for Diffusion Distillation

Linqian Fan, Peiqin Sun, Tiancheng Wen, Shun Lu, Chengru Song

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but are fundamentally bottlenecked by their slow, iterative sampling process. While diffusion distillation techniques enable high-fidelity, few-step generation, traditional objectives often restrict the student's performance by anchoring it solely to the teacher. Recent approaches have attempted to break this ceiling by integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically through a simple summation of distillation and RL objectives. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm by re-conceptualizing distribution matching as a reward, denoted as $R_\text{dm}$. This unified perspective bridges the algorithmic gap between Diffusion Matching Distillation (DMD) and RL, providing several primary benefits. (1) Enhanced Optimization Stability: We introduce Group Normalized Distribution Matching (GNDM), which adapts standard RL group normalization to stabilize $R_\text{dm}$ estimation. By leveraging group-mean statistics, GNDM establishes a more robust and effective optimization direction. (2) Seamless Reward Integration: Our reward-centric formulation inherently supports adaptive weighting mechanisms, allowing for the fluid combination of DMD with external reward models. (3) Improved Sampling Efficiency: By aligning with RL principles, the framework readily incorporates Importance Sampling (IS), leading to a significant boost in sampling efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GNDM outperforms vanilla DMD, reducing the FID by 1.87. Furthermore, our multi-reward variant, GNDMR, surpasses existing baselines by striking an optimal balance between aesthetic quality and fidelity, achieving a peak HPS of 30.37 and a low FID-SD of 12.21. Ultimately, $R_\text{dm}$ provides a flexible, stable, and efficient framework for real-time, high-fidelity synthesis. Codes are coming soon.

♻ ☆ Noise-adapted Neural Operator for Robust Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging

Lianfang Wang, Kuilin Qin, Xueying Liu, Huibin Chang, Yong Wang, Yuping Duan

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Computational imaging, especially non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging, the extraction of information from obscured or hidden scenes is achieved through the utilization of indirect light signals resulting from multiple reflections or scattering. The inherently weak nature of these signals, coupled with their susceptibility to noise, necessitates the integration of physical processes to ensure accurate reconstruction. This paper presents a parameterized inverse problem framework tailored for large-scale linear problems in 3D imaging reconstruction. Initially, a noise estimation module is employed to adaptively assess the noise levels present in transient data. Subsequently, a parameterized neural operator is developed to approximate the inverse mapping, facilitating end-to-end rapid image reconstruction. Our 3D image reconstruction framework, grounded in operator learning, is constructed through deep algorithm unfolding, which not only provides commendable model interpretability but also enables dynamic adaptation to varying noise levels in the acquired data, thereby ensuring consistently robust and accurate reconstruction outcomes. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method for the fusion of global and local spatiotemporal data features. By integrating structural and detailed information, this method significantly enhances both accuracy and robustness. Comprehensive numerical experiments conducted on both simulated and real datasets substantiate the efficacy of the proposed method. It demonstrates remarkable performance with fast scanning data and sparse illumination point data, offering a viable solution for NLOS imaging in complex scenarios.

♻ ☆ DeepCoT: Deep Continual Transformers for Real-Time Inference on Data Streams

Ginés Carreto Picón, Peng Yuan Zhou, Qi Zhang, Alexandros Iosifidis

Transformer-based models have dramatically increased their size and parameter count to tackle increasingly complex tasks. At the same time, there is a growing demand for high performance, low-latency inference on devices with limited resources. In particular, stream data inference is typically performed over a sliding temporal window, leading to highly redundant computations. While the recent Continual Transformers started addressing this issue, they can be effectively used only in shallow models, which limits their scope and generalization power. In this paper, we propose the Deep Continual Transformer (DeepCoT), a redundancy-free encoder attention mechanism that can be applied over existing deep encoder architectures with minimal changes. In our experiments over audio, video, and text streams, we show that DeepCoTs retain comparative performance to their non-continual baselines while offering a linear computational cost for all Transformer layers, which reduces up to two orders of magnitude in the running time compared to previous efficient models.

comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

♻ ☆ From Plausibility to Verifiability: Risk-Controlled Generative OCR for Vision-Language Models

Weile Gong, Yiping Zuo, Zijian Lu, Xin He, Weibei Fan, Lianyong Qi, Shi Jin

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) can act as generative OCR engines, yet open-ended decoding can expose rare but consequential failures. We identify a core deployment misalignment in generative OCR. Autoregressive decoding favors semantic plausibility, whereas OCR requires outputs that are visually grounded and geometrically verifiable. This mismatch produces severe errors, especially over-generation and unsupported substitutions, creating deployment risk even when benchmark accuracy remains high. We therefore formulate frozen VLM OCR as a selective accept/abstain problem and propose a model-agnostic Geometric Risk Controller. The controller probes multiple structured views of the same input, applies lightweight structural screening, and accepts a transcription only when cross-view consensus and stability satisfy predefined criteria, yielding a small family of operating points. Experiments on frozen VLM backbones and standard OCR benchmarks show consistent reductions in extreme-error risk and catastrophic over-generation at predictable coverage costs. Reliable deployment of generative OCR with frozen VLMs benefits from explicit system-level risk control rather than unconstrained generation.

comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

♻ ☆ The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding

Weichen Fan, Haiwen Diao, Quan Wang, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu

Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity within a single latent space, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we show that UAE can be directly applied to pixel-space modeling, significantly improving both FID and IS over the vanilla JIT baseline. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE.

comment: Code link: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE

♻ ☆ EagleNet: Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network for Text-Video Retrieval CVPR 2026

Yuhan Chen, Pengwen Dai, Chuan Wang, Dayan Wu, Xiaochun Cao

Text-video retrieval tasks have seen significant improvements due to the recent development of large-scale vision-language pre-trained models. Traditional methods primarily focus on video representations or cross-modal alignment, while recent works shift toward enriching text expressiveness to better match the rich semantics in videos. However, these methods use only interactions between text and frames/video, and ignore rich interactions among the internal frames within a video, so the final expanded text cannot capture frame contextual information, leading to disparities between text and video. In response, we introduce Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network (EagleNet) to generate accurate and context-aware enriched text embeddings. Specifically, the proposed Fine-Grained Relationship Learning mechanism (FRL) first constructs a text-frame graph by the generated text candidates and frames, then learns relationships among texts and frames, which are finally used to aggregate text candidates into an enriched text embedding that incorporates frame contextual information. To further improve fine-grained relationship learning in FRL, we design Energy-Aware Matching (EAM) to model the energy of text-frame interactions and thus accurately capture the distribution of real text-video pairs. Moreover, for more effective cross-modal alignment and stable training, we replace the conventional softmax-based contrastive loss with the sigmoid loss. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of EagleNet across MSRVTT, DiDeMo, MSVD, and VATEX. Codes are available at https://github.com/draym28/EagleNet.

comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ SleepVLM: Explainable and Rule-Grounded Sleep Staging via a Vision-Language Model

Guifeng Deng, Pan Wang, Jiquan Wang, Shuying Rao, Junyi Xie, Wanjun Guo, Tao Li, Haiteng Jiang

While automated sleep staging has achieved expert-level accuracy, its clinical adoption is hindered by a lack of auditable reasoning. We introduce SleepVLM, a rule-grounded vision-language model (VLM) designed to stage sleep from multi-channel polysomnography (PSG) waveform images while generating clinician-readable rationales based on American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) scoring criteria. Utilizing waveform-perceptual pre-training and rule-grounded supervised fine-tuning, SleepVLM achieved Cohen's kappa scores of 0.767 on an held out test set (MASS-SS1) and 0.743 on an external cohort (ZUAMHCS), matching state-of-the-art performance. Expert evaluations further validated the quality of the model's reasoning, with mean scores exceeding 4.0/5.0 for factual accuracy, evidence comprehensiveness, and logical coherence. By coupling competitive performance with transparent, rule-based explanations, SleepVLM may improve the trustworthiness and auditability of automated sleep staging in clinical workflows. To facilitate further research in interpretable sleep medicine, we release MASS-EX, a novel expert-annotated dataset.

comment: Under review

♻ ☆ Improving Liver Disease Diagnosis with SNNDeep: A Custom Spiking Neural Network Using Diverse Learning Algorithms

Zofia Rudnicka, Janusz Szczepanski, Agnieszka Pregowska

Purpose: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently gained attention as energy-efficient, biologically plausible alternatives to conventional deep learning models. Their application in high-stakes biomedical imaging remains almost entirely unexplored. Methods: This study introduces SNNDeep, the first tailored SNN specifically optimized for binary classification of liver health status from computed tomography (CT) features. To ensure clinical relevance and broad generalizability, the model was developed and evaluated using the Task03\Liver dataset from the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD), a standardized benchmark widely used for assessing performance across diverse medical imaging tasks. We benchmark three fundamentally different learning algorithms, namely Surrogate Gradient Learning, the Tempotron rule, and Bio-Inspired Active Learning across three architectural variants: a fully customized low-level model built from scratch, and two implementations using leading SNN frameworks, i.e., snnTorch and SpikingJelly. Hyperparameter optimization was performed using Optuna. Results: Our results demonstrate that the custom-built SNNDeep consistently outperforms framework-based implementations, achieving a maximum validation accuracy of 98.35%, superior adaptability across learning rules, and significantly reduced training overhead. Conclusion:This study provides the first empirical evidence that low-level, highly tunable SNNs can surpass standard frameworks in medical imaging, especially in data-limited, temporally constrained diagnostic settings, thereby opening a new pathway for neuro-inspired AI in precision medicine.

♻ ☆ Universal Skeleton Understanding via Differentiable Rendering and MLLMs

Ziyi Wang, Peiming Li, Xinshun Wang, Yang Tang, Kai-Kuang Ma, Mengyuan Liu

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong visual-language reasoning, yet remain confined to their native modalities and cannot directly process structured, non-visual data such as human skeletons. Existing methods either compress skeleton dynamics into lossy feature vectors for text alignment, or quantize motion into discrete tokens that generalize poorly across heterogeneous skeleton formats. We present SkeletonLLM, which achieves universal skeleton understanding by translating arbitrary skeleton sequences into the MLLM's native visual modality. At its core is DrAction, a differentiable, format-agnostic renderer that converts skeletal kinematics into compact image sequences. Because the pipeline is end-to-end differentiable, MLLM gradients can directly guide the rendering to produce task-informative visual tokens. To further enhance reasoning capabilities, we introduce a cooperative training strategy: Causal Reasoning Distillation transfers structured, step-by-step reasoning from a teacher model, while Discriminative Finetuning sharpens decision boundaries between confusable actions. SkeletonLLM demonstrates strong generalization on diverse tasks including recognition, captioning, reasoning, and cross-format transfer -- suggesting a viable path for applying MLLMs to non-native modalities. Code will be released upon acceptance.

comment: 32 pages, 15 figures

♻ ☆ SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World CVPR 2026

Jungho Kim, Jiyong Oh, Seunghoon Yu, Hongjae Shin, Donghyuk Kwak, Jun Won Choi

The end-to-end (E2E) paradigm, which maps sensor inputs directly to driving decisions, has recently attracted significant attention due to its unified modeling capability and scalability. However, ensuring safety in this unified framework remains one of the most critical challenges. In this work, we propose SafeDrive, an E2E planning framework designed to perform explicit and interpretable safety reasoning through a trajectory-conditioned Sparse World Model. SafeDrive comprises two complementary networks: the Sparse World Network (SWNet) and the Fine-grained Reasoning Network (FRNet). SWNet constructs trajectory-conditioned sparse worlds that simulate the future behaviors of critical dynamic agents and road entities, providing interaction-centric representations for downstream reasoning. FRNet then evaluates agent-specific collision risks and temporal adherence to drivable regions, enabling precise identification of safety-critical events across future timesteps. SafeDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. On NAVSIM, it records a PDMS of 91.6 and an EPDMS of 87.5, with only 61 collisions out of 12,146 scenarios (0.5%). On Bench2Drive, SafeDrive attains a 66.8% driving score.

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026, 19 pages, 9 figures

♻ ☆ A Provable Energy-Guided Test-Time Defense Boosting Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models CVPR

Mujtaba Hussain Mirza, Antonio D'Orazio, Odelia Melamed, Iacopo Masi

Despite the rapid progress in multimodal models and Large Visual-Language Models (LVLM), they remain highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations, raising serious concerns about their reliability in real-world use. While adversarial training has become the leading paradigm for building models that are robust to adversarial attacks, Test-Time Transformations (TTT) have emerged as a promising strategy to boost robustness at inference. In light of this, we propose Energy-Guided Test-Time Transformation (ET3), a lightweight, training-free defense that enhances the robustness by minimizing the energy of the input samples. Our method is grounded in a theory that proves our transformation succeeds in classification under reasonable assumptions. We present extensive experiments demonstrating that ET3 provides a strong defense for classifiers, zero-shot classification with CLIP, and also for boosting the robustness of LVLMs in tasks such as Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering. Code is available at github.com/OmnAI-Lab/Energy-Guided-Test-Time-Defense .

comment: Accepted at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026, Main Conference

♻ ☆ Detection of Adversarial Attacks in Robotic Perception

Ziad Sharawy, Mohammad Nakshbandi, Sorin Mihai Grigorescu

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve strong performance in semantic segmentation for robotic perception but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, threatening safety-critical applications. While robustness has been studied for image classification, semantic segmentation in robotic contexts requires specialized architectures and detection strategies.

comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted and presented at STE 2025, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania

♻ ☆ VIGiA: Instructional Video Guidance via Dialogue Reasoning and Retrieval ACL 2026

Diogo Glória-Silva, David Semedo, João Maglhães

We introduce VIGiA, a novel multimodal dialogue model designed to understand and reason over complex, multi-step instructional video action plans. Unlike prior work which focuses mainly on text-only guidance, or treats vision and language in isolation, VIGiA supports grounded, plan-aware dialogue that requires reasoning over visual inputs, instructional plans, and interleaved user interactions. To this end, VIGiA incorporates two key capabilities: (1) multimodal plan reasoning, enabling the model to align uni- and multimodal queries with the current task plan and respond accurately; and (2) plan-based retrieval, allowing it to retrieve relevant plan steps in either textual or visual representations. Experiments were done on a novel dataset with rich Instructional Video Dialogues aligned with Cooking and DIY plans. Our evaluation shows that VIGiA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on all tasks in a conversational plan guidance setting, reaching over 90\% accuracy on plan-aware VQA.

comment: Published at EACL 2026 Findings

♻ ☆ Hardware-Algorithm Co-Optimization of Early-Exit Neural Networks for Multi-Core Edge Accelerators

Alaa Zniber, Arne Symons, Ouassim Karrakchou, Marian Verhelst, Mounir Ghogho

Deployment of dynamic neural networks on edge accelerators requires careful consideration of hardware constraints beyond conventional complexity metrics such as Multiply-Accumulate operations. In Early-Exiting Neural Networks (EENN), exit placement, quantization level, and hardware workload mapping interact in non-trivial ways, influencing memory traffic, accelerator utilization, and ultimately energy-latency trade-offs. These interactions remain insufficiently understood in existing Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches, which typically rely on proxy metrics or hardware-in-the-loop evaluation. This work presents a hardware-algorithm co-design framework for EENN that explicitly models the interplay between quantization, exit configuration, and multi-core accelerator mapping. Using analytical design space exploration, we characterize how small architectural variations can induce disproportionate changes in hardware efficiency due to tensor dimension alignment and dataflow effects. Building on this analysis, we formulate EENN deployment as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem balancing accuracy, energy-latency product, exit overhead, and dynamic inference behavior. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 demonstrate that the proposed framework identifies architectures achieving over 50\% reduction in energy-latency product compared to static baselines under 8-bit quantization. The results highlight the importance of deployment-aware co-design for dynamic inference on heterogeneous edge platforms.

♻ ☆ GERD: Geometric event response data generation

Jens Egholm Pedersen, Dimitris Korakovounis, Jörg Conradt

Event-based vision sensors offer high time resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, yet event-based vision models lag behind conventional frame-based vision methods. We argue that this gap is partly due to the lack of principled study of the transformation groups that govern event-based visual streams. Motivated by the role that geometric and group-theoretic methods have played in advancing computer vision, we present GERD: a simulator for generating event-based recordings of objects under precisely controlled affine, Galilean, and temporal scaling transformations. By providing ground-truth transformations at each timestep, GERD enables hypothesis-driven and controlled studies of geometric properties that are otherwise impossible to isolate in real-world datasets. The simulator supports three noise models and sub-pixel motion as a complement to real sensor datasets. We demonstrate its use in training and evaluating models with geometric guarantees and release GERD as an open tool available at github.com/ncskth/gerd

♻ ☆ SVBench: Evaluation of Video Generation Models on Social Reasoning

Wenshuo Peng, Gongxuan Wang, Tianmeng Yang, Chuanhao Li, Xiaojie Xu, Hui He, Kaipeng Zhang

Recent text-to-video generation models have made remarkable progress in visual realism, motion fidelity, and text-video alignment, yet they still struggle to produce socially coherent behavior. Unlike humans, who readily infer intentions, beliefs, emotions, and social norms from brief visual cues, current models often generate literal scenes without capturing the underlying causal and psychological dynamics. To systematically assess this limitation, we introduce the first benchmark for social reasoning in video generation. Grounded in developmental and social psychology, the benchmark covers thirty classic social cognition paradigms spanning seven core dimensions: mental-state inference, goal-directed action, joint attention, social coordination, prosocial behavior, social norms, and multi-agent strategy. To operationalize these paradigms, we build a fully training-free agent-based pipeline that distills the reasoning structure of each paradigm, synthesizes diverse video-ready scenarios, enforces conceptual neutrality and difficulty control through cue-based critique, and evaluates generated videos with a high-capacity VLM judge along five interpretable dimensions of social reasoning. Using this framework, we conduct the first large-scale evaluation of seven state-of-the-art video generation systems. Results show a clear gap between surface-level plausibility and deeper social reasoning, suggesting that current models remain limited in their ability to generate socially grounded behavior. https://github.com/Gloria2tt/SVBench-Evaluation

comment: 10pages

♻ ☆ StreetTree: A Large-Scale Global Benchmark for Fine-Grained Tree Species Classification

Jiapeng Li, Yingjing Huang, Fan Zhang, Yu liu

The fine grained classification of street trees is a crucial task for urban planning, streetscape management, and the assessment of urban ecosystem services. However, progress in this field has been hindered by the lack of large scale, geographically diverse, and publicly available benchmark datasets specifically designed for street trees. To address this critical gap, we introduce StreetTree, the world's first large scale benchmark dataset dedicated to fine grained street tree classification. The dataset contains over 12 million images covering more than 8,300 common street tree species, collected from urban streetscapes across 133 countries spanning five continents, and supplemented with expert verified observational data. StreetTree poses challenges for pretrained vision models under complex urban environments including high inter species visual similarity, long tailed natural distributions, significant intra class variations caused by seasonal changes, and diverse imaging conditions such as lighting, occlusions from buildings, and varying camera angles. In addition, we provide a hierarchical taxonomy (order, family, genus, and species) to support research in hierarchical classification and representation learning. Through extensive experiments with various vision models, we establish solid baselines and reveal the limitations of existing methods in handling such real world complexities. We believe that StreetTree will serve as a key resource for driving new advancements at the intersection of computer vision and urban science.

♻ ☆ CreatiDesign: A Unified Multi-Conditional Diffusion Transformer for Creative Graphic Design ICLR 2026

Hui Zhang, Dexiang Hong, Maoke Yang, Yutao Cheng, Zhao Zhang, Weidong Chen, Jie Shao, Xinglong Wu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang

Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.

comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ Generative AI Enables Structural Brain Network Construction from fMRI via Symmetric Diffusion Learning

Qiankun Zuo, Bangjun Lei, Wanyu Qiu, Changhong Jing, Jin Hong, Shuqiang Wang

Mapping from functional connectivity (FC) to structural connectivity (SC) can facilitate multimodal brain network fusion and discover potential biomarkers for clinical implications. However, it is challenging to directly bridge the reliable non-linear mapping relations between SC and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this paper, a novel symmetric diffusive generative adversarial network-based fMRI-to-SC (DiffGAN-F2S) model is proposed to predict SC from brain fMRI in a unified framework. To be specific, the proposed DiffGAN-F2S leverages denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) and adversarial learning to efficiently generate symmetric and high-fidelity SC through a few steps from fMRI. By designing the dual-channel multi-head spatial attention (DMSA) and graph convolutional modules, the symmetric graph generator first captures global relations among direct and indirect connected brain regions, then models the local brain region interactions. It can uncover the complex mapping relations between fMRI and symmetric structural connectivity. Furthermore, the spatially connected consistency loss is devised to constrain the generator to preserve global-local topological information for accurate symmetric SC prediction. Testing on the public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, the proposed model can effectively generate empirical SC-preserved connectivity from four-dimensional imaging data and shows superior performance in SC prediction compared with other related models. Furthermore, the proposed model can identify the vast majority of important brain regions and connections derived from the empirical method, providing an alternative way to fuse multimodal brain networks and analyze clinical brain disease.

comment: 12 pages

♻ ☆ "It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models

Kapil Garg, Xinru Tang, Jimin Heo, Dwayne R. Morgan, Darren Gergle, Erik B. Sudderth, Anne Marie Piper

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used by blind and low-vision (BLV) people to identify and understand products in their everyday lives, such as food, personal care items, and household goods. Despite their prevalence, we lack an empirical understanding of how common image quality issues--such as blur, misframing, and rotation--affect the accuracy of VLM-generated captions and whether the resulting captions meet BLV people's information needs. Based on a survey of 86 BLV participants, we develop an annotated dataset of 1,859 product images from BLV people to systematically evaluate how image quality issues affect VLM-generated captions. While the best VLM achieves 98% accuracy on images with no quality issues, accuracy drops to 75% overall when quality issues are present, worsening considerably as issues compound. We discuss the need for model evaluations that center on disabled people's experiences throughout the process and offer concrete recommendations for HCI and ML researchers to make VLMs more reliable for BLV people.

comment: Published at CHI 2026; Honorable Mention for Best Paper (Top 5%). Dataset available at: https://github.com/Accessibility-Research-Collective-UCI/image-quality-vlm-chi26

♻ ☆ TUGS: Physics-based Compact Representation of Underwater Scenes by Tensorized Gaussian

Shijie Lian, Ziyi Zhang, Hua Li, Laurence Tianruo Yang, Mengyu Ren, Debin Liu, Wenhui Wu

Underwater 3D scene reconstruction is crucial for multimedia applications in adverse environments, such as underwater robotic perception and navigation. However, the complexity of interactions between light propagation, water medium, and object surfaces poses significant difficulties for existing methods in accurately simulating their interplay. Additionally, expensive training and rendering costs limit their practical application. Therefore, we propose Tensorized Underwater Gaussian Splatting (TUGS), a compact underwater 3D representation based on physical modeling of complex underwater light fields. TUGS includes a physics-based underwater Adaptive Medium Estimation (AME) module, enabling accurate simulation of both light attenuation and backscatter effects in underwater environments, and introduces Tensorized Densification Strategies (TDS) to efficiently refine the tensorized representation during optimization. TUGS is able to render high-quality underwater images with faster rendering speeds and less memory usage. Extensive experiments on real-world underwater datasets have demonstrated that TUGS can efficiently achieve superior reconstruction quality using a limited number of parameters. The code is available at https://liamlian0727.github.io/TUGS

♻ ☆ Early Exiting Predictive Coding Neural Networks for Edge AI

Alaa Zniber, Mounir Ghogho, Ouassim Karrakchou, Mehdi Zakroum

The Internet of Things is transforming various fields, with sensors increasingly embedded in wearables, smart buildings, and connected equipment. While deep learning enables valuable insights from IoT data, conventional models are too computationally demanding for resource-limited edge devices. Moreover, privacy concerns and real-time processing needs make local computation a necessity over cloud-based solutions. Inspired by the brain's energy efficiency, we propose a shallow bidirectional predictive coding network with early exiting, dynamically halting computations once a performance threshold is met. This reduces the memory footprint and computational overhead while maintaining high accuracy. We validate our approach using the CIFAR-10 dataset. Our model achieves performance comparable to deep networks with significantly fewer parameters and lower computational complexity, demonstrating the potential of biologically inspired architectures for efficient edge AI.

♻ ☆ SGS-Intrinsic: Semantic-Invariant Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Indoor Inverse Rendering CVPR2026

Jiahao Niu, Rongjia Zheng, Wenju Xu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Qing Zhang

We present SGS-Intrinsic, an indoor inverse rendering framework that works well for sparse-view images. Unlike existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based methods that focus on object-centric reconstruction and fail to work under sparse view settings, our method allows to achieve high-quality geometry reconstruction and accurate disentanglement of material and illumination. The core idea is to construct a dense and geometry-consistent Gaussian semantic field guided by semantic and geometric priors, providing a reliable foundation for subsequent inverse rendering. Building upon this, we perform material-illumination disentanglement by combining a hybrid illumination model and material prior to effectively capture illumination-material interactions. To mitigate the impact of cast shadows and enhance the robustness of material recovery, we introduce illumination-invariant material constraint together with a deshadowing model. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently improves both reconstruction fidelity and inverse rendering quality over existing 3DGS-based inverse rendering approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/GrumpySloths/SGS_Intrinsic.github.io.

comment: CVPR2026

♻ ☆ Multi-Modal Representation Learning via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction for Generalized Category Discovery CVPR 2026

Wei He, Xianghan Meng, Zhiyuan Huang, Xianbiao Qi, Rong Xiao, Chun-Guang Li

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to identify both known and unknown categories, with only partial labels given for the known categories, posing a challenging open-set recognition problem. State-of-the-art approaches for GCD task are usually built on multi-modality representation learning, which is heavily dependent upon inter-modality alignment. However, few of them cast a proper intra-modality alignment to generate a desired underlying structure of representation distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective multi-modal representation learning framework for GCD via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction, called SSR$^2$-GCD, to learn cross-modality representations with desired structural properties based on emphasizing to properly align intra-modality relationships. Moreover, to boost knowledge transfer, we integrate prompt candidates by leveraging the inter-modal alignment offered by Vision Language Models. We conduct extensive experiments on generic and fine-grained benchmark datasets demonstrating superior performance of our approach.

comment: 15 pages, accepted by CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer

Dong Zhuo, Wenzhao Zheng, Jiahe Guo, Yuqi Wu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

Perceiving and reconstructing 3D geometry from videos is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task. To facilitate interactive and low-latency applications, we propose a streaming visual geometry transformer that shares a similar philosophy with autoregressive large language models. We explore a simple and efficient design and employ a causal transformer architecture to process the input sequence in an online manner. We use temporal causal attention and cache the historical keys and values as implicit memory to enable efficient streaming long-term 3D reconstruction. This design can handle low-latency 3D reconstruction by incrementally integrating historical information while maintaining high-quality spatial consistency. For efficient training, we propose to distill knowledge from the dense bidirectional visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT) to our causal model. For inference, our model supports the migration of optimized efficient attention operators (e.g., FlashAttention) from large language models. Extensive experiments on various 3D geometry perception benchmarks demonstrate that our model enhances inference speed in online scenarios while maintaining competitive performance, thereby facilitating scalable and interactive 3D vision systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT.

comment: Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT

♻ ☆ Modeling Spatiotemporal Neural Frames for High Resolution Brain Dynamic CVPR 2026

Wanying Qu, Jianxiong Gao, Wei Wang, Yanwei Fu

Capturing dynamic spatiotemporal neural activity is essential for understanding large-scale brain mechanisms. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides high-resolution cortical representations that form a strong basis for characterizing fine-grained brain activity patterns. The high acquisition cost of fMRI limits large-scale applications, therefore making high-quality fMRI reconstruction a crucial task. Electroencephalography (EEG) offers millisecond-level temporal cues that complement fMRI. Leveraging this complementarity, we present an EEG-conditioned framework for reconstructing dynamic fMRI as continuous neural sequences with high spatial fidelity and strong temporal coherence at the cortical-vertex level. To address sampling irregularities common in real fMRI acquisitions, we incorporate a null-space intermediate-frame reconstruction, enabling measurement-consistent completion of arbitrary intermediate frames and improving sequence continuity and practical applicability. Experiments on the CineBrain dataset demonstrate superior voxel-wise reconstruction quality and robust temporal consistency across whole-brain and functionally specific regions. The reconstructed fMRI also preserves essential functional information, supporting downstream visual decoding tasks. This work provides a new pathway for estimating high-resolution fMRI dynamics from EEG and advances multimodal neuroimaging toward more dynamic brain activity modeling.

comment: CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Towards Policy-Adaptive Image Guardrail: Benchmark and Method

Caiyong Piao, Zhiyuan Yan, Haoming Xu, Yunzhen Zhao, Kaiqing Lin, Feiyang Xu, Shuigeng Zhou

Accurate rejection of sensitive or harmful visual content, i.e., harmful image guardrail, is critical in many application scenarios. This task must continuously adapt to the evolving safety policies and content across various domains and over time. However, traditional classifiers, confined to fixed categories, require frequent retraining when new policies are introduced. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a more adaptable and generalizable foundation for dynamic safety guardrails. Despite this potential, existing VLM-based safeguarding methods are typically trained and evaluated under only a fixed safety policy. We find that these models are heavily overfitted to the seen policy, fail to generalize to unseen policies, and even lose the basic instruction-following ability and general knowledge. To address this issue, in this paper we make two key contributions. First, we benchmark the cross-policy generalization performance of existing VLMs with SafeEditBench, a new evaluation suite. SafeEditBench leverages image-editing models to convert unsafe images into safe counterparts, producing policy-aligned datasets where each safe-unsafe image pair remains visually similar except for localized regions violating specific safety rules. Human annotators then provide accurate safe/unsafe labels under five distinct policies, enabling fine-grained assessment of policy-aware generalization. Second, we introduce SafeGuard-VL, a reinforcement learning-based method with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for robust unsafe-image guardrails. Instead of relying solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) under fixed policies, SafeGuard-VL explicitly optimizes the model with policy-grounded rewards, promoting verifiable adaptation across evolving policies. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method for unsafe image guardrails across various policies.

♻ ☆ Can We Build a Monolithic Model for Fake Image Detection? SICA: Semantic-Induced Constrained Adaptation for Unified-Yet-Discriminative Artifact Feature Space Reconstruction

Bo Du, Xiaochen Ma, Xuekang Zhu, Zhe Yang, Chaogun Niu, Mingqi Fang, Zhenming Wang, Jingjing Liu, Jian Liu, Ji-Zhe Zhou

Fake Image Detection (FID), aiming at unified detection across four image forensic subdomains, is critical in real-world forensic scenarios. Compared with ensemble approaches, monolithic FID models are theoretically more promising, but to date, consistently yield inferior performance in practice. In this work, by discovering the ``heterogeneous phenomenon'', which is the intrinsic distinctness of artifacts across subdomains, we diagnose the cause of this underperformance for the first time: the collapse of the artifact feature space driven by such phenomenon. The core challenge for developing a practical monolithic FID model thus boils down to the ``unified-yet-discriminative" reconstruction of the artifact feature space. To address this paradoxical challenge, we hypothesize that high-level semantics can serve as a structural prior for the reconstruction, and further propose Semantic-Induced Constrained Adaptation (SICA), the first monolithic FID paradigm. Extensive experiments on our OpenMMSec dataset demonstrate that SICA outperforms 15 state-of-the-art methods and reconstructs the target unified-yet-discriminative artifact feature space in a near-orthogonal manner, thus firmly validating our hypothesis. The code and dataset are available at:https: //github.com/scu-zjz/SICA_OpenMMSec.

♻ ☆ Super-Resolved Canopy Height Mapping from Sentinel-2 Time Series Using LiDAR HD Reference Data across Metropolitan France

Ekaterina Kalinicheva, Florian Helen, Stéphane Mermoz, Florian Mouret, Milena Planells

Fine-scale forest monitoring is essential for understanding canopy structure and its dynamics, which are key indicators of carbon stocks, biodiversity, and forest health. Deep learning is particularly effective for this task, as it integrates spectral, temporal, and spatial signals that jointly reflect the canopy structure. To address this need, we introduce THREASURE-Net, a novel end-to-end framework for Tree Height Regression And Super-Resolution. The model is trained on Sentinel-2 time series using reference height metrics derived from LiDAR HD data at multiple spatial resolutions over Metropolitan France to produce annual height maps. We evaluate three model variants, producing tree-height predictions at 2.5 m, 5 m, and 10 m resolution. THREASURE-Net does not rely on any pretrained model nor on reference very high resolution optical imagery to train its super-resolution module; instead, it learns solely from LiDAR-derived height information. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods based on Sentinel data and is competitive with methods based on very high resolution imagery. It can be deployed to generate high-precision annual canopy-height maps, achieving mean absolute errors of 2.63 m, 2.70 m, and 2.88 m at 2.5 m, 5 m, and 10 m resolution, respectively. These results highlight the potential of THREASURE-Net for scalable and cost-effective structural monitoring of temperate forests using only freely available satellite data. The source code for THREASURE-Net is available at: https://github.com/Global-Earth-Observation/threasure-net.

♻ ☆ Unified Multimodal Models as Auto-Encoders

Zhiyuan Yan, Kaiqing Lin, Zongjian Li, Junyan Ye, Hui Han, Haochen Wang, Zhendong Wang, Bin Lin, Hao Li, Xinyan Xiao, Jingdong Wang, Haifeng Wang, Li Yuan

Image-to-text (I2T) understanding and text-to-image (T2I) generation are two fundamental, important yet traditionally isolated multimodal tasks. Despite their intrinsic connection, existing approaches typically optimize them independently, missing the opportunity for mutual enhancement. In this paper, we argue that the both tasks can be connected under a shared Auto-Encoder perspective, where text serves as the intermediate latent representation bridging the two directions - encoding images into textual semantics (I2T) and decoding text back into images (T2I). Our key insight is that if the encoder truly "understands" the image, it should capture all essential structure, and if the decoder truly "understands" the text, it should recover that structure faithfully. Building upon this principle, we propose Unified-GRPO, a post-training method based on reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes both modules through reconstructive rewards, maximizing the semantic consistency between the input and the generated images. Under this reconstruction objective, the encoder is encouraged to extract as much accurate and comprehensive semantic information from the input image to maximize reconstruction quality, while the decoder is simultaneously optimized to generate conditioned on the encoder's prior, enabling a self-evolving improvement. Empirically, we find that using text as the intermediate representation and training under a reconstructive RL paradigm effectively benefits both I2T and T2I. The I2T module gains stronger fine-grained visual perception, such as small-object recognition, grounding, etc, while its dense embeddings and language priors, in turn, provide richer semantic signals that improve T2I fidelity and complex instruction following. These results demonstrate that the reconstructive RL establishes a mutually reinforcing cross-modal synergy within the auto-encoding framework.

♻ ☆ BST: Badminton Stroke-type Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition in Racket Sports CVPR

Jing-Yuan Chang

Badminton, known for having the fastest ball speeds among all sports, presents significant challenges to the field of computer vision, including player identification, court line detection, shuttlecock trajectory tracking, and player stroke-type classification. In this paper, we introduce a novel video clipping strategy to extract frames of each player's racket swing in a badminton broadcast match. These clipped frames are then processed by three existing models: one for Human Pose Estimation to obtain human skeletal joints, another for shuttlecock trajectory tracking, and the other for court line detection to determine player positions on the court. Leveraging these data as inputs, we propose Badminton Stroke-type Transformer (BST) to classify player stroke-types in singles. To the best of our knowledge, experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on the largest publicly available badminton video dataset (ShuttleSet), another badminton dataset (BadmintonDB), and a tennis dataset (TenniSet). These results suggest that effectively leveraging ball trajectory is a promising direction for action recognition in racket sports.

comment: Accepted by CVPRW 2026 - 12th CVsports

♻ ☆ TruckDrive: Long-Range Autonomous Highway Driving Dataset

Filippo Ghilotti, Edoardo Palladin, Samuel Brucker, Adam Sigal, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide

Safe highway autonomy for heavy trucks remains an open and unsolved challenge: due to long braking distances, scene understanding of hundreds of meters is required for anticipatory planning and to allow safe braking margins. However, existing driving datasets primarily cover urban scenes, with perception effectively limited to short ranges of only up to 100 meters. To address this gap, we introduce TruckDrive, a highway-scale multimodal driving dataset, captured with a sensor suite purpose-built for long range sensing: seven long-range FMCW LiDARs measuring range and radial velocity, three high-resolution short-range LiDARs, eleven 8MP surround cameras with varying focal lengths and ten 4D FMCW radars. The dataset offers 475 thousands samples with 165 thousands densely annotated frames for driving perception benchmarking up to 1,000 meters for 2D detection and 400 meters for 3D detection, depth estimation, tracking, planning and end to end driving over 20 seconds sequences at highway speeds. We find that state-of-the-art autonomous driving models do not generalize to ranges beyond 150 meters, with drops between 31% and 99% in 3D perception tasks, exposing a systematic long-range gap that current architectures and training signals cannot close.

♻ ☆ Human-level 3D shape perception emerges from multi-view learning

Tyler Bonnen, Jitendra Malik, Angjoo Kanazawa

Humans can infer the three-dimensional structure of objects from two-dimensional visual inputs. Modeling this ability has been a longstanding goal for the science and engineering of visual intelligence, yet decades of computational methods have fallen short of human performance. Here we develop a modeling framework that predicts human 3D shape inferences for arbitrary objects, directly from experimental stimuli. We achieve this with a novel class of neural networks trained using a visual-spatial objective over naturalistic sensory data; given a set of images taken from different locations within a natural scene, these models learn to predict spatial information related to these images, such as camera location and visual depth, without relying on any object-related inductive biases. Notably, these visual-spatial signals are analogous to sensory cues readily available to humans. We design a zero-shot evaluation approach to determine the performance of these 'multi-view' models on a well established 3D perception task, then compare model and human behavior. Our modeling framework is the first to match human accuracy on 3D shape inferences, even without task-specific training or fine-tuning. Remarkably, independent readouts of model responses predict fine-grained measures of human behavior, including error patterns and reaction times, revealing a natural correspondence between model dynamics and human perception. Taken together, our findings indicate that human-level 3D perception can emerge from a simple, scalable learning objective over naturalistic visual-spatial data. Code, images, and human data needed to reproduce all analyses can be found at https://tzler.github.io/human_multiview/

comment: Project page: https://tzler.github.io/human_multiview Code: https://github.com/tzler/human_multiview Huggingface dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/tzler/MOCHI

♻ ☆ ANVIL: Accelerator-Native Video Interpolation via Codec Motion Vector Priors

Shibo Liu

Real-time 30-to-60 fps video frame interpolation on mobile neural processing units (NPUs) requires each synthesized frame within 33.3 ms. We show that mainstream flow-based video frame interpolation faces three structural deployment barriers on mobile NPUs: spatial sampling operators exceed the frame budget or lack hardware support, iterative flow refinement collapses under 8-bit integer post-training quantization, and memory-bound operators dominate the inference graph. ANVIL addresses these barriers by reusing motion vectors from the H.264/AVC decoder to prealign input frames, removing learned optical flow, spatial sampling, and iterative accumulation from the accelerator graph. The remaining residual is refined by a convolution-dominated network composed almost entirely of compute-bound operators. On a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 device, ANVIL achieves 12.8 ms 1080p inference at 8-bit integer precision; an open-source Android player sustains 28.4 ms median end-to-end latency over 30-minute continuous playback. Per-operator causal analysis identifies quantized accumulation on recurrent flow states as a key mechanism behind integer quantization failure in iterative methods. The current design targets H.264/AVC playback with decoder-exposed motion vectors.

comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 10 tables. Submitted to IEEE TCSVT. v2: revised ablation studies, compressed text, expanded abstract abbreviations. Code: https://github.com/NihilDigit/anvil

♻ ☆ ReAG: Reasoning-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering CVPR 2026

Alberto Compagnoni, Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Federico Cocchi, Davide Caffagni, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence.

comment: CVPR 2026 - Project page: https://aimagelab.github.io/ReAG/

♻ ☆ Granular Ball Guided Stable Latent Domain Discovery for Domain-General Crowd Counting

Fan Chen, Shuyin Xia, Yi Wang

Single-source domain generalization for crowd counting is highly challenging because a single labeled source domain may contain heterogeneous latent domains, while unseen target domains often exhibit severe distribution shifts. A central issue is stable latent domain discovery: directly performing flat clustering on evolving sample-level latent features is easily disturbed by feature noise, outliers, and representation drift, leading to unreliable pseudo-domain assignments and weakened domain-structured learning. To address this problem, we propose a granular ball guided stable latent domain discovery framework for domain-general crowd counting. The proposed method first groups samples into compact local granular balls and then clusters granular ball centers as representatives to infer pseudo-domains, thereby converting direct sample-level clustering into a hierarchical representative-based clustering process. This design produces more stable and semantically consistent pseudo-domain assignments. On top of the discovered latent domains, we develop a two-branch learning framework that improves transferable semantic representations via semantic codebook re-encoding and captures domain-specific appearance variations through a style branch, thereby alleviating semantic--style entanglement under domain shifts. Extensive experiments on ShanghaiTech A/B, UCF\_QNRF, and NWPU-Crowd under a strict no-adaptation protocol verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and show strong generalization ability, especially in transfer settings with large domain gaps.

♻ ☆ Image Segmentation via Divisive Normalization: dealing with environmental diversity

Pablo Hernández-Cámara, Jorge Vila-Tomás, Paula Dauden-Oliver, Nuria Alabau-Bosque, Valero Laparra, Jesús Malo

Autonomous driving is a challenging scenario for image segmentation due to the presence of uncontrolled environmental conditions and the eventually catastrophic consequences of failures. Previous work suggested that a biologically motivated computation, the so-called Divisive Normalization, could be useful to deal with image variability, but its effects have not been systematically studied over different data sources and environmental factors. Here we put segmentation U-nets augmented with Divisive Normalization to work far from training conditions to find where this adaptation is more critical. We categorize the scenes according to their radiance level and dynamic range (day/night), and according to their achromatic/chromatic contrasts. We also consider video game (synthetic) images to broaden the range of environments. We check the performance in the extreme percentiles of such categorization. Then, we push the limits further by artificially modifying the images in perceptually/environmentally relevant dimensions: luminance, contrasts and spectral radiance. Results show that neural networks with Divisive Normalization get better results in all the scenarios and their performance remains more stable with regard to the considered environmental factors and nature of the source. Finally, we explain the improvements in segmentation performance in two ways: (1) by quantifying the invariance of the responses that incorporate Divisive Normalization, and (2) by illustrating the adaptive nonlinearity of the different layers that depends on the local activity.

♻ ☆ ALADIN:Attribute-Language Distillation Network for Person Re-Identification

Wang Zhou, Boran Duan, Haojun Ai, Ruiqi Lan, Ziyue Zhou

Recent vision-language models such as CLIP provide strong cross-modal alignment, but current CLIP-guided ReID pipelines rely on global features and fixed prompts. This limits their ability to capture fine-grained attribute cues and adapt to diverse appearances. We propose ALADIN, an attribute-language distillation network that distills knowledge from a frozen CLIP teacher to a lightweight ReID student. ALADIN introduces fine-grained attribute-local alignment to establish adaptive text-visual correspondence and robust representation learning. A Scene-Aware Prompt Generator produces image-specific soft prompts to facilitate adaptive alignment. Attribute-local distillation enforces consistency between textual attributes and local visual features, significantly enhancing robustness under occlusions. Furthermore, we employ cross-modal contrastive and relation distillation to preserve the inherent structural relationships among attributes. To provide precise supervision, we leverage Multimodal LLMs to generate structured attribute descriptions, which are then converted into localized attention maps via CLIP. At inference, only the student is used. Experiments on Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 show improvements over CNN-, Transformer-, and CLIP-based methods, with better generalization and interpretability.

comment: 14pages, 3figures, 7charts

♻ ☆ Image-Specific Adaptation of Transformer Encoders for Compute-Efficient Segmentation

Manyi Yao, Abhishek Aich, Yumin Suh, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Christian Shelton, Manmohan Chandraker

Vision transformer based models bring significant improvements for image segmentation tasks. Although these architectures offer powerful capabilities irrespective of specific segmentation tasks, their use of computational resources can be taxing on deployed devices. One way to overcome this challenge is by adapting the computation level to the specific needs of the input image rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach. To this end, we introduce ECO-M2F or EffiCient TransfOrmer Encoders for Mask2Former-style models. Noting that the encoder module of M2F-style models incur high resource-intensive computations, ECO-M2F provides a strategy to self-select the number of hidden layers in the encoder, conditioned on the input image. To enable this self-selection ability for providing a balance between performance and computational efficiency, we present a three step recipe. The first step is to train the parent architecture to enable early exiting from the encoder. The second step is to create an derived dataset of the ideal number of encoder layers required for each training example. The third step is to use the aforementioned derived dataset to train a gating network that predicts the number of encoder layers to be used, conditioned on the input image. Additionally, to change the computational-accuracy tradeoff, only steps two and three need to be repeated which significantly reduces retraining time. Experiments on the public datasets show that the proposed approach reduces expected encoder computational cost while maintaining performance, adapts to various user compute resources, is flexible in architecture configurations, and can be extended beyond the segmentation task to object detection.

comment: Accepted at WACV 2026 WVAQ

♻ ☆ ArtLLM: Generating Articulated Assets via 3D LLM CVPR 2026

Penghao Wang, Siyuan Xie, Hongyu Yan, Xianghui Yang, Jingwei Huang, Chunchao Guo, Jiayuan Gu

Creating interactive digital environments for gaming, robotics, and simulation relies on articulated 3D objects whose functionality emerges from their part geometry and kinematic structure. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally limited: optimization-based reconstruction methods require slow, per-object joint fitting and typically handle only simple, single-joint objects, while retrieval-based methods assemble parts from a fixed library, leading to repetitive geometry and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce ArtLLM, a novel framework for generating high-quality articulated assets directly from complete 3D meshes. At its core is a 3D multimodal large language model trained on a large-scale articulation dataset curated from both existing articulation datasets and procedurally generated objects. Unlike prior work, ArtLLM autoregressively predicts a variable number of parts and joints, inferring their kinematic structure in a unified manner from the object's point cloud. This articulation-aware layout then conditions a 3D generative model to synthesize high-fidelity part geometries. Experiments on the PartNet-Mobility dataset show that ArtLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both part layout accuracy and joint prediction, while generalizing robustly to real-world objects. Finally, we demonstrate its utility in constructing digital twins, highlighting its potential for scalable robot learning.

comment: CVPR 2026. Project page: https://authoritywang.github.io/artllm/

♻ ☆ PartNeXt: A Next-Generation Dataset for Fine-Grained and Hierarchical 3D Part Understanding NeurIPS 2025

Penghao Wang, Yiyang He, Xin Lv, Yukai Zhou, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu, Jiayuan Gu

Understanding objects at the level of their constituent parts is fundamental to advancing computer vision, graphics, and robotics. While datasets like PartNet have driven progress in 3D part understanding, their reliance on untextured geometries and expert-dependent annotation limits scalability and usability. We introduce PartNeXt, a next-generation dataset addressing these gaps with over 23,000 high-quality, textured 3D models annotated with fine-grained, hierarchical part labels across 50 categories. We benchmark PartNeXt on two tasks: (1) class-agnostic part segmentation, where state-of-the-art methods (e.g., PartField, SAMPart3D) struggle with fine-grained and leaf-level parts, and (2) 3D part-centric question answering, a new benchmark for 3D-LLMs that reveals significant gaps in open-vocabulary part grounding. Additionally, training Point-SAM on PartNeXt yields substantial gains over PartNet, underscoring the dataset's superior quality and diversity. By combining scalable annotation, texture-aware labels, and multi-task evaluation, PartNeXt opens new avenues for research in structured 3D understanding.

comment: NeurIPS 2025 DB Track. Project page: https://authoritywang.github.io/partnext

♻ ☆ Fast SceneScript: Fast and Accurate Language-Based 3D Scene Understanding via Multi-Token Prediction CVPR 2026

Ruihong Yin, Xuepeng Shi, Oleksandr Bailo, Marco Manfredi, Theo Gevers

Recent perception-generalist approaches based on language models have achieved state-of-the-art results across diverse tasks, including 3D scene layout estimation and 3D object detection, via unified architecture and interface. However, these approaches rely on autoregressive next-token prediction, which is inherently slow. In this work, we introduce Fast SceneScript, a novel structured language model for accurate and efficient 3D scene understanding. Our method employs multi-token prediction (MTP) to reduce the number of autoregressive iterations and significantly accelerate inference. While MTP improves speed, unreliable token predictions can significantly reduce accuracy. To filter out unreliable tokens, we adapt self-speculative decoding (SSD) for structured language models and introduce confidence-guided decoding (CGD) with an improved scoring mechanism for token reliability. Furthermore, we design a parameter-efficient mechanism that reduces the parameter overhead of MTP. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Fast SceneScript can generate up to 9 tokens per decoder inference step without compromising accuracy, while adding only $\sim7.5\%$ additional parameters.

comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026

♻ ☆ Fine-grained Image Quality Assessment for Perceptual Image Restoration AAAI2026

Xiangfei Sheng, Xiaofeng Pan, Zhichao Yang, Pengfei Chen, Leida Li

Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in perceptual image restoration (IR), creating an urgent demand for accurate image quality assessment (IQA), which is essential for both performance comparison and algorithm optimization. Unfortunately, the existing IQA metrics exhibit inherent weakness for IR task, particularly when distinguishing fine-grained quality differences among restored images. To address this dilemma, we contribute the first-of-its-kind fine-grained image quality assessment dataset for image restoration, termed FGRestore, comprising 18,408 restored images across six common IR tasks. Beyond conventional scalar quality scores, FGRestore was also annotated with 30,886 fine-grained pairwise preferences. Based on FGRestore, a comprehensive benchmark was conducted on the existing IQA metrics, which reveal significant inconsistencies between score-based IQA evaluations and the fine-grained restoration quality. Motivated by these findings, we further propose FGResQ, a new IQA model specifically designed for image restoration, which features both coarse-grained score regression and fine-grained quality ranking. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that FGResQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art IQA metrics. Codes and model weights have been released in https://sxfly99.github.io/FGResQ-Home.

comment: Accepted by AAAI2026

♻ ☆ JoyStreamer: Unlocking Highly Expressive Avatars via Harmonized Text-Audio Conditioning

Ruikui Wang, Jinheng Feng, Lang Tian, Huaishao Luo, Chaochao Li, Liangbo Zhou, Huan Zhang, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He

Existing video avatar models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in scenarios such as talking, public speaking, and singing. However, the majority of these methods exhibit limited alignment with respect to text instructions, particularly when the prompts involve complex elements including large full-body movement, dynamic camera trajectory, background transitions, or human-object interactions. To break out this limitation, we present JoyAvatar, a framework capable of generating long duration avatar videos, featuring two key technical innovations. Firstly, we introduce a twin-teacher enhanced training algorithm that enables the model to transfer inherent text-controllability from the foundation model while simultaneously learning audio-visual synchronization. Secondly, during training, we dynamically modulate the strength of multi-modal conditions (e.g., audio and text) based on the distinct denoising timestep, aiming to mitigate conflicts between the heterogeneous conditioning signals. These two key designs serve to substantially expand the avatar model's capacity to generate natural, temporally coherent full-body motions and dynamic camera movements as well as preserve the basic avatar capabilities, such as accurate lip-sync and identity consistency. GSB evaluation results demonstrate that our JoyStreamer model outperforms the state-of-the-art models such as Omnihuman-1.5 and KlingAvatar 2.0. Moreover, our approach enables complex applications including multi-person dialogues and non-human subjects role-playing. Some video samples are provided on https://joystreamer.github.io/.

♻ ☆ GUIDE: Resolving Domain Bias in GUI Agents through Real-Time Web Video Retrieval and Plug-and-Play Annotation

Rui Xie, Zhi Gao, Chenrui Shi, Zirui Shang, Lu Chen, Qing Li

Large vision-language models have endowed GUI agents with strong general capabilities for interface understanding and interaction. However, due to insufficient exposure to domain-specific software operation data during training, these agents exhibit significant domain bias - they lack familiarity with the specific operation workflows (planning) and UI element layouts (grounding) of particular applications, limiting their real-world task performance. In this paper, we present GUIDE (GUI Unbiasing via Instructional-Video Driven Expertise), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that resolves GUI agent domain bias by autonomously acquiring domain-specific expertise from web tutorial videos through a retrieval-augmented automated annotation pipeline. GUIDE introduces two key innovations. First, a subtitle-driven Video-RAG pipeline unlocks video semantics through subtitle analysis, performing progressive three-stage retrieval - domain classification, topic extraction, and relevance matching - to identify task-relevant tutorial videos. Second, a fully automated annotation pipeline built on an inverse dynamics paradigm feeds consecutive keyframes enhanced with UI element detection into VLMs, inferring the required planning and grounding knowledge that are injected into the agent's corresponding modules to address both manifestations of domain bias. Extensive experiments on OSWorld demonstrate GUIDE's generality as a plug-and-play component for both multi-agent systems and single-model agents. It consistently yields over 5% improvements and reduces execution steps - without modifying any model parameters or architecture - validating GUIDE as an architecture-agnostic enhancement to bridge GUI agent domain bias.

comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables

♻ ☆ Towards Foundation Models for 3D Scene Understanding: Instance-Aware Self-Supervised Learning for Point Clouds CVPR2026

Bin Yang, Mohamed Abdelsamad, Miao Zhang, Alexandru Paul Condurache

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) for point clouds have substantially improved 3D scene understanding without human annotations. Existing approaches emphasize semantic awareness by enforcing feature consistency across augmented views or by masked scene modeling. However, the resulting representations transfer poorly to instance localization, and often require full finetuning for strong performance. Instance awareness is a fundamental component of 3D perception, thus bridging this gap is crucial for progressing toward true 3D foundation models that support all downstream tasks on 3D data. In this work, we introduce PointINS, an instance-oriented self-supervised framework that enriches point cloud representations through geometry-aware learning. PointINS employs an orthogonal offset branch to jointly learn high-level semantic understanding and geometric reasoning, yielding instance awareness. We identify two consistent properties essential for robust instance localization and formulate them as complementary regularization strategies, Offset Distribution Regularization (ODR), which aligns predicted offsets with empirically observed geometric priors, and Spatial Clustering Regularization (SCR), which enforces local coherence by regularizing offsets with pseudo-instance masks. Through extensive experiments across five datasets, PointINS achieves on average +3.5% mAP improvement for indoor instance segmentation and +4.1% PQ gain for outdoor panoptic segmentation, paving the way for scalable 3D foundation models.

comment: The paper was accepted by CVPR2026

♻ ☆ Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding CVPR 2026

Jihao Gu, Kun Li, He Wang, Kaan Akşit

Subtle abnormal events in videos often manifest as weak spatio-temporal cues that are easily overlooked by conventional anomaly detection systems. Existing video anomaly detection approaches typically provide coarse binary anomaly decisions without interpretable evidence, while large vision-language models (LVLMs) can produce textual judgments but lack precise localization of subtle visual signals. To address this gap, we propose Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding T-VAU, a framework that grounds subtle anomaly evidence into multimodal reasoning. Specifically, we introduce an Anomaly Heatmap Decoder (AHD) that performs visual-textual feature alignment to extract pixel-level spatio-temporal anomaly heatmaps from intermediate visual representations. We further design a Region-aware Anomaly Encoder (RAE) that converts these heatmaps into structured prompt embeddings, enabling the LVLM to perform anomaly detection, localization, and semantic explanation in a unified reasoning pipeline. To support fine-grained supervision, we construct a target-level fine-grained video-text anomaly dataset derived from ShanghaiTech and UBnormal with detailed annotations of object appearance, localization, and motion trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-VAU significantly improves anomaly localization and textual reasoning performance on both benchmarks, achieving strong results in BLEU-4 metrics and Yes/No decision accuracy while providing interpretable pixel-level spatio-temporal evidence for anomaly understanding. The code will be available at https://github.com/momiji-bit/T-VAU.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026 SVC Workshop

♻ ☆ JoyStreamer-Flash: Real-time and Infinite Audio-Driven Avatar Generation with Autoregressive Diffusion

Chaochao Li, Ruikui Wang, Liangbo Zhou, Jinheng Feng, Huaishao Luo, Huan Zhang, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He

Existing DiT-based audio-driven avatar generation methods have achieved considerable progress, yet their broader application is constrained by limitations such as high computational overhead and the inability to synthesize long-duration videos. Autoregressive methods address this problem by applying block-wise autoregressive diffusion methods. However, these methods suffer from the problem of error accumulation and quality degradation. To address this, we propose JoyStreamer-Flash, an audio-driven autoregressive model capable of real-time inference and infinite-length video generation with the following contributions: (1) Progressive Step Bootstrapping (PSB), which allocates more denoising steps to initial frames to stabilize generation and reduce error accumulation; (2) Motion Condition Injection (MCI), enhancing temporal coherence by injecting noise-corrupted previous frames as motion condition; and (3) Unbounded RoPE via Cache-Resetting (URCR), enabling infinite-length generation through dynamic positional encoding. Our 1.3B-parameter causal model achieves 16 FPS on a single GPU and achieves competitive results in visual quality, temporal consistency, and lip synchronization.

♻ ☆ A Novel Camera-to-Robot Calibration Method for Vision-Based Floor Measurements

Jan Andre Rudolph, Dennis Haitz, Markus Ulrich

A novel hand-eye calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots is proposed. While cameras on mobile robots are common, they are rarely used for ground-observing measurement tasks. Laser trackers are increasingly used in robotics for precise localization. A referencing plate is designed to combine the two measurement modalities of laser-tracker 3D metrology and camera-based 2D imaging. It incorporates reflector nests for pose acquisition using a laser tracker and a camera calibration target that is observed by the robot-mounted camera. The procedure comprises estimating the plate pose, the plate-camera pose, and the robot pose, followed by computing the robot-camera transformation. Experiments indicate sub-millimeter repeatability.

comment: 8 pages; accepted for publication in the ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences

♻ ☆ JaWildText: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Models on Japanese Scene Text Understanding

Koki Maeda, Naoaki Okazaki

Japanese scene text poses challenges that multilingual benchmarks often fail to capture, including mixed scripts, frequent vertical writing, and a character inventory far larger than the Latin alphabet. Although Japanese is included in several multilingual benchmarks, these resources do not adequately capture the language-specific complexities. Meanwhile, existing Japanese visual text datasets have primarily focused on scanned documents, leaving in-the-wild scene text underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce JaWildText, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Japanese scene text understanding. JaWildText contains 3,241 instances from 2,961 images newly captured in Japan, with 1.12 million annotated characters spanning 3,643 unique character types. It comprises three complementary tasks that vary in visual organization, output format, and writing style: (i) Dense Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), which requires reasoning over multiple pieces of visual text evidence; (ii) Receipt Key Information Extraction (KIE), which tests layout-aware structured extraction from mobile-captured receipts; and (iii) Handwriting OCR, which evaluates page-level transcription across various media and writing directions. We evaluate 14 open-weight VLMs and find that the best model achieves an average score of 0.64 across the three tasks. Error analyses show recognition remains the dominant bottleneck, especially for kanji. JaWildText enables fine-grained, script-aware diagnosis of Japanese scene text capabilities, and will be released with evaluation code.

comment: 18 pages

♻ ☆ Know-Show: Benchmarking Video-Language Models on Spatio-Temporal Grounded Reasoning

Chinthani Sugandhika, Chen Li, Deepu Rajan, Basura Fernando

Large Video-Language Models (Video-LMs) have achieved impressive progress in multimodal understanding, yet their reasoning remains weakly grounded in space and time. We present Know-Show, a new benchmark designed to evaluate spatio-temporal grounded reasoning, the ability of a model to reason about actions and their semantics while simultaneously grounding its inferences in visual and temporal evidence. Know-Show unifies reasoning and localization within a single evaluation framework consisting of five complementary scenarios across spatial (person, object, person-object, and hand-object) and temporal dimensions. Built from Charades, Action Genome, and Ego4D with 2.5K high-quality human-authored questions, the benchmark exposes significant gaps between current Video-LMs and human reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose GRAM, a training-free plug-in that augments Video-LMs with fine-grained grounded reasoning through attention-based video token selection and explicit timestamp encoding. Extensive experiments across open and closed Video-LMs (e.g., Qwen, VideoR1, Gemini, and GPT-4o) reveal that existing models struggle to "show what they know" and vice versa. Know-Show establishes a unified standard for assessing grounded reasoning in video-language understanding and provides insights toward developing interpretable and reliable multimodal reasoning systems. We have released the dataset at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/Know-Show, and the code will be released in the same repository.

♻ ☆ Med-CMR: A Fine-Grained Benchmark Integrating Visual Evidence and Clinical Logic for Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning

Haozhen Gong, Xiaozhong Ji, Yuansen Liu, Wenbin Wu, Xiaoxiao Yan, Jingjing Liu, Kai Wu, Jiazhen Pan, Bailiang Jian, Jiangning Zhang, Xiaobin Hu, Hongwei Bran Li

MLLMs MLLMs are beginning to appear in clinical workflows, but their ability to perform complex medical reasoning remains unclear. We present Med-CMR, a fine-grained Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning benchmark. Med-CMR distinguishes from existing counterparts by three core features: 1) Systematic capability decomposition, splitting medical multimodal reasoning into fine-grained visual understanding and multi-step reasoning to enable targeted evaluation; 2) Challenging task design, with visual understanding across three key dimensions (small-object detection, fine-detail discrimination, spatial understanding) and reasoning covering four clinically relevant scenarios (temporal prediction, causal reasoning, long-tail generalization, multi-source integration); 3) Broad, high-quality data coverage, comprising 20,653 Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs spanning 11 organ systems and 12 imaging modalities, validated via a rigorous two-stage (human expert + model-assisted) review to ensure clinical authenticity. We evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs with Med-CMR, revealing GPT-5 as the top-performing commercial model: 57.81 accuracy on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and a 48.70 open-ended score, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro (49.87 MCQ accuracy, 45.98 open-ended score) and leading open-source model Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B (49.34 MCQ accuracy, 42.62 open-ended score). However, specialized medical MLLMs do not reliably outperform strong general models, and long-tail generalization emerges as the dominant failure mode. Med-CMR thus provides a stress test for visual-reasoning integration and rare-case robustness in medical MLLMs, and a rigorous yardstick for future clinical systems.

♻ ☆ ProFashion: Prototype-guided Fashion Video Generation with Multiple Reference Images CVPR

Xianghao Kong, Qiaosong Qi, Yuanbin Wang, Biaolong Chen, Aixi Zhang, Anyi Rao

Fashion video generation aims to synthesize temporally consistent videos from reference images of a designated character. Despite significant progress, existing diffusion-based methods only support a single reference image as input, severely limiting their capability to generate view-consistent fashion videos, especially when there are different patterns on the clothes from different perspectives. Moreover, the widely adopted motion module does not sufficiently model human body movement, leading to sub-optimal spatiotemporal consistency. To address these issues, we propose ProFashion, a fashion video generation framework leveraging multiple reference images to achieve improved view consistency and temporal coherency. To effectively leverage features from multiple reference images while maintaining a reasonable computational cost, we devise a Pose-aware Prototype Aggregator, which selects and aggregates global and fine-grained reference features according to pose information to form frame-wise prototypes, which serve as guidance in the denoising process. To further enhance motion consistency, we introduce a Flow-enhanced Prototype Instantiator, which exploits the human keypoint motion flow to guide an extra spatiotemporal attention process in the denoiser. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ProFashion, we extensively evaluate our method on the MRFashion-7K dataset we collected from the Internet. ProFashion also outperforms previous methods on the UBC Fashion dataset.

comment: CVPRW 2026

☆ Aligned, Orthogonal or In-conflict: When can we safely optimize Chain-of-Thought?

Max Kaufmann, David Lindner, Roland S. Zimmermann, and Rohin Shah

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring, in which automated systems monitor the CoT of an LLM, is a promising approach for effectively overseeing AI systems. However, the extent to which a model's CoT helps us oversee the model - the monitorability of the CoT - can be affected by training, for instance by the model learning to hide important features of its reasoning. We propose and empirically validate a conceptual framework for predicting when and why this occurs. We model LLM post-training as an RL environment where the reward decomposes into two terms: one term depending on final outputs and another term depending on the CoT. Our framework allows us to classify these two terms as "aligned", "orthogonal", or "in-conflict" before training. We predict that training with in-conflict terms will reduce monitorability, orthogonal terms will not affect it, and aligned terms will improve it. To validate our framework, we use it to classify a set of RL environments, train LLMs within those environments, and evaluate how training affects CoT monitorability. We find that (1) training with "in-conflict" reward terms reduces CoT monitorability and (2) optimizing in-conflict reward terms is difficult.

☆ Reward-Based Online LLM Routing via NeuralUCB

Ming-Hua Tsai, Phat Tran

This study investigates the use of NeuralUCB for cost-aware large language model (LLM) routing. Existing routing approaches can be broadly grouped into supervised routing methods and partial-feedback methods, each with different tradeoffs in efficiency and adaptivity. We implement a NeuralUCB-based routing policy and evaluate it on RouterBench under a simulated online setting. Experimental results show that the proposed method consistently outperforms random and min-cost baselines in utility reward. Compared with the max-quality reference, our method achieves substantially lower inference cost while maintaining competitive reward. These findings suggest that NeuralUCB is a promising approach for cost-aware LLM routing, while also highlighting remaining challenges in action discrimination and exploration.

☆ Tucker Attention: A generalization of approximate attention mechanisms

Timon Klein, Jonas Kusch, Sebastian Sager, Stefan Schnake, Steffen Schotthöfer

The pursuit of reducing the memory footprint of the self-attention mechanism in multi-headed self attention (MHA) spawned a rich portfolio of methods, e.g., group-query attention (GQA) and multi-head latent attention (MLA). The methods leverage specialized low-rank factorizations across embedding dimensions or attention heads. From the point of view of classical low-rank approximation, these methods are unconventional and raise questions of which objects they really approximate and how to interpret the low-rank behavior of the resulting representations. To answer these questions, this work proposes a generalized view on the weight objects in the self-attention layer and a factorization strategy, which allows us to construct a parameter efficient scheme, called Tucker Attention. Tucker Attention requires an order of magnitude fewer parameters for comparable validation metrics, compared to GQA and MLA, as evaluated in LLM and ViT test cases. Additionally, Tucker Attention~encompasses GQA, MLA, MHA as special cases and is fully compatible with flash-attention and rotary position embeddings (RoPE). This generalization strategy yields insights of the actual ranks achieved by MHA, GQA, and MLA, and further enables simplifications for MLA.

☆ Refined Detection for Gumbel Watermarking

Tor Lattimore

We propose a simple detection mechanism for the Gumbel watermarking scheme proposed by Aaronson (2022). The new mechanism is proven to be near-optimal in a problem-dependent sense among all model-agnostic watermarking schemes under the assumption that the next-token distribution is sampled i.i.d.

☆ Tracking Equivalent Mechanistic Interpretations Across Neural Networks ICLR 2026

Alan Sun, Mariya Toneva

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) is an emerging framework for interpreting neural networks. Given a task and model, MI aims to discover a succinct algorithmic process, an interpretation, that explains the model's decision process on that task. However, MI is difficult to scale and generalize. This stems in part from two key challenges: there is no precise notion of a valid interpretation; and, generating interpretations is often an ad hoc process. In this paper, we address these challenges by defining and studying the problem of interpretive equivalence: determining whether two different models share a common interpretation, without requiring an explicit description of what that interpretation is. At the core of our approach, we propose and formalize the principle that two interpretations of a model are equivalent if all of their possible implementations are also equivalent. We develop an algorithm to estimate interpretive equivalence and case study its use on Transformer-based models. To analyze our algorithm, we introduce necessary and sufficient conditions for interpretive equivalence based on models' representation similarity. We provide guarantees that simultaneously relate a model's algorithmic interpretations, circuits, and representations. Our framework lays a foundation for the development of more rigorous evaluation methods of MI and automated, generalizable interpretation discovery methods.

comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, ICLR 2026

☆ Aligning Validation with Deployment: Target-Weighted Cross-Validation for Spatial Prediction

Alexander Brenning, Thomas Suesse

Cross-validation (CV) is commonly used to estimate predictive risk when independent test data are unavailable. Its validity depends on the assumption that validation tasks are sampled from the same distribution as prediction tasks encountered during deployment. In spatial prediction and other settings with structured data, this assumption is frequently violated, leading to biased estimates of deployment risk. We propose Target-Weighted CV (TWCV), an estimator of deployment risk that accounts for discrepancies between validation and deployment task distributions, thus accounting for (1) covariate shift and (2) task-difficulty shift. We characterize prediction tasks by descriptors such as covariates and spatial configuration. TWCV assigns weights to validation losses such that the weighted empirical distribution of validation tasks matches the corresponding distribution over a target domain. The weights are obtained via calibration weighting, yielding an importance-weighted estimator that targets deployment risk. Since TWCV requires adequate coverage of the deployment distribution's support, we combine it with spatially buffered resampling that diversifies the task difficulty distribution. In a simulation study, conventional as well as spatial estimators exhibit substantial bias depending on sampling, whereas buffered TWCV remains approximately unbiased across scenarios. A case study in environmental pollution mapping further confirms that discrepancies between validation and deployment task distributions can affect performance assessment, and that buffered TWCV better reflects the prediction task over the target domain. These results establish task distribution mismatch as a primary source of CV bias in spatial prediction and show that calibration weighting combined with a suitable validation task generator provides a viable approach to estimating predictive risk under dataset shift.

☆ Quantifying Cross-Modal Interactions in Multimodal Glioma Survival Prediction via InterSHAP: Evidence for Additive Signal Integration

Iain Swift, JingHua Ye, Ruairi O'Reilly

Multimodal deep learning for cancer prognosis is commonly assumed to benefit from synergistic cross-modal interactions, yet this assumption has not been directly tested in survival prediction settings. This work adapts InterSHAP, a Shapley interaction index-based metric, from classification to Cox proportional hazards models and applies it to quantify cross-modal interactions in glioma survival prediction. Using TCGA-GBM and TCGA-LGG data (n=575), we evaluate four fusion architectures combining whole-slide image (WSI) and RNA-seq features. Our central finding is an inverse relationship between predictive performance and measured interaction: architectures achieving superior discrimination (C-index 0.64$\to$0.82) exhibit equivalent or lower cross-modal interaction (4.8\%$\to$3.0\%). Variance decomposition reveals stable additive contributions across all architectures (WSI${\approx}$40\%, RNA${\approx}$55\%, Interaction${\approx}$4\%), indicating that performance gains arise from complementary signal aggregation rather than learned synergy. These findings provide a practical model auditing tool for comparing fusion strategies, reframe the role of architectural complexity in multimodal fusion, and have implications for privacy-preserving federated deployment.

comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, under review at XAI 2026 LBW

☆ Meteorology-Driven GPT4AP: A Multi-Task Forecasting LLM for Atmospheric Air Pollution in Data-Scarce Settings

Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

Accurate forecasting of air pollution is important for environmental monitoring and policy support, yet data-driven models often suffer from limited generalization in regions with sparse observations. This paper presents Meteorology-Driven GPT for Air Pollution (GPT4AP), a parameter-efficient multi-task forecasting framework based on a pre-trained GPT-2 backbone and Gaussian rank-stabilized low-rank adaptation (rsLoRA). The model freezes the self-attention and feed-forward layers and adapts lightweight positional and output modules, substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters. GPT4AP is evaluated on six real-world air quality monitoring datasets under few-shot, zero-shot, and long-term forecasting settings. In the few-shot regime using 10% of the training data, GPT4AP achieves an average MSE/MAE of 0.686/0.442, outperforming DLinear (0.728/0.530) and ETSformer (0.734/0.505). In zero-shot cross-station transfer, the proposed model attains an average MSE/MAE of 0.529/0.403, demonstrating improved generalization compared with existing baselines. In long-term forecasting with full training data, GPT4AP remains competitive, achieving an average MAE of 0.429, while specialized time-series models show slightly lower errors. These results indicate that GPT4AP provides a data-efficient forecasting approach that performs robustly under limited supervision and domain shift, while maintaining competitive accuracy in data-rich settings.

comment: This manuscript is under review

☆ Do covariates explain why these groups differ? The choice of reference group can reverse conclusions in the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition

Manuel Quintero, Advik Shreekumar, William T. Stephenson, Tamara Broderick

Scientists often want to explain why an outcome is different in two groups. For instance, differences in patient mortality rates across two hospitals could be due to differences in the patients themselves (covariates) or differences in medical care (outcomes given covariates). The Oaxaca--Blinder decomposition (OBD) is a standard tool to tease apart these factors. It is well known that the OBD requires choosing one of the groups as a reference, and the numerical answer can vary with the reference. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been a systematic investigation into whether the choice of OBD reference can yield different substantive conclusions and how common this issue is. In the present paper, we give existence proofs in real and simulated data that the OBD references can yield substantively different conclusions and that these differences are not entirely driven by model misspecification or small data. We prove that substantively different conclusions occur in up to half of the parameter space, but find these discrepancies rare in the real-data analyses we study. We explain this empirical rarity by examining how realistic data-generating processes can be biased towards parameters that do not change conclusions under the OBD.

comment: 21 pages, 5 figures

☆ Think Anywhere in Code Generation

Xue Jiang, Tianyu Zhang, Ge Li, Mengyang Liu, Taozhi Chen, Zhenhua Xu, Binhua Li, Wenpin Jiao, Zhi Jin, Yongbin Li, Yihong Dong

Recent advances in reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily relied on upfront thinking, where reasoning occurs before final answer. However, this approach suffers from critical limitations in code generation, where upfront thinking is often insufficient as problems' full complexity only reveals itself during code implementation. Moreover, it cannot adaptively allocate reasoning effort throughout the code generation process where difficulty varies significantly. In this paper, we propose Think-Anywhere, a novel reasoning mechanism that enables LLMs to invoke thinking on-demand at any token position during code generation. We achieve Think-Anywhere by first teaching LLMs to imitate the reasoning patterns through cold-start training, then leveraging outcome-based RL rewards to drive the model's autonomous exploration of when and where to invoke reasoning. Extensive experiments on four mainstream code generation benchmarks (i.e., LeetCode, LiveCodeBench, HumanEval, and MBPP) show that Think-Anywhere achieves state-of-the-art performance over both existing reasoning methods and recent post-training approaches, while demonstrating consistent generalization across diverse LLMs. Our analysis further reveals that Think-Anywhere enables the model to adaptively invoke reasoning at high-entropy positions, providing enhanced interpretability.

☆ Real-Time Explanations for Tabular Foundation Models ICLR 2026

Luan Borges Teodoro Reis Sena, Francisco Galuppo Azevedo

Interpretability is central for scientific machine learning, as understanding \emph{why} models make predictions enables hypothesis generation and validation. While tabular foundation models show strong performance, existing explanation methods like SHAP are computationally expensive, limiting interactive exploration. We introduce ShapPFN, a foundation model that integrates Shapley value regression directly into its architecture, producing both predictions and explanations in a single forward pass. On standard benchmarks, ShapPFN achieves competitive performance while producing high-fidelity explanations ($R^2$=0.96, cosine=0.99) over 1000\times faster than KernelSHAP (0.06s vs 610s). Our code is available at https://github.com/kunumi/ShapPFN

comment: Accepted at the 2nd DATA4Science Workshop at ICLR 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=StSMBSZqxx

☆ Better than Average: Spatially-Aware Aggregation of Segmentation Uncertainty Improves Downstream Performance CVPR 2026

Vanessa Emanuela Guarino, Claudia Winklmayr, Jannik Franzen, Josef Lorenz Rumberger, Manuel Pfeuffer, Sonja Greven, Klaus Maier-Hein, Carsten T. Lüth, Christoph Karg, Dagmar Kainmueller

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of automated image segmentations in safety-critical domains like biomedical image analysis or autonomous driving. In segmentation, UQ generates pixel-wise uncertainty scores that must be aggregated into image-level scores for downstream tasks like Out-of-Distribution (OoD) or failure detection. Despite routine use of aggregation strategies, their properties and impact on downstream task performance have not yet been comprehensively studied. Global Average is the default choice, yet it does not account for spatial and structural features of segmentation uncertainty. Alternatives like patch-, class- and threshold-based strategies exist, but lack systematic comparison, leading to inconsistent reporting and unclear best practices. We address this gap by (1) formally analyzing properties, limitations, and pitfalls of common strategies; (2) proposing novel strategies that incorporate spatial uncertainty structure and (3) benchmarking their performance on OoD and failure detection across ten datasets that vary in image geometry and structure. We find that aggregators leveraging spatial structure yield stronger performance in both downstream tasks studied. However, the performance of individual aggregators depends heavily on dataset characteristics, so we (4) propose a meta-aggregator that integrates multiple aggregators and performs robustly across datasets.

comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables. Accepted at CVPR 2026 (The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026)

☆ End-to-End Image Compression with Segmentation Guided Dual Coding for Wind Turbines

Raül Pérez-Gonzalo, Andreas Espersen, Søren Forchhammer, Antonio Agudo

Transferring large volumes of high-resolution images during wind turbine inspections introduces a bottleneck in assessing and detecting severe defects. Efficient coding must preserve high fidelity in blade regions while aggressively compressing the background. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework that jointly performs segmentation and dual-mode (lossy and lossless) compression. The segmentation module accurately identifies the blade region, after which our region-of-interest (ROI) compressor encodes it at superior quality compared to the rest of the image. Unlike conventional ROI schemes that merely allocate more bits to salient areas, our framework integrates: (i) a robust segmentation network (BU-Netv2+P) with a CRF-regularized loss for precise blade localization, (ii) a hyperprior-based autoencoder optimized for lossy compression, and (iii) an extended bits-back coder with hierarchical models for fully lossless blade reconstruction. Furthermore, our ROI framework removes the sequential dependency in bits-back coding by reusing background-coded bits, enabling parallelized and efficient dual-mode compression. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully integrated learning-based ROI codec combining segmentation, lossy, and lossless compression, ensuring that subsequent defect detection is not compromised. Experiments on a large-scale wind turbine dataset demonstrate superior compression performance and efficiency, offering a practical solution for automated inspections.

comment: Accepted to TNNLS 2026

☆ Uncertainty Gating for Cost-Aware Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Georgii Mikriukov, Grégoire Montavon, Marina M. -C. Höhne

Post-hoc explanation methods are widely used to interpret black-box predictions, but their generation is often computationally expensive and their reliability is not guaranteed. We propose epistemic uncertainty as a low-cost proxy for explanation reliability: high epistemic uncertainty identifies regions where the decision boundary is poorly defined and where explanations become unstable and unfaithful. This insight enables two complementary use cases: `improving worst-case explanations' (routing samples to cheap or expensive XAI methods based on expected explanation reliability), and `recalling high-quality explanations' (deferring explanation generation for uncertain samples under constrained budget). Across four tabular datasets, five diverse architectures, and four XAI methods, we observe a strong negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and explanation stability. Further analysis shows that epistemic uncertainty distinguishes not only stable from unstable explanations, but also faithful from unfaithful ones. Experiments on image classification confirm that our findings generalize beyond tabular data.

☆ Task Scarcity and Label Leakage in Relational Transfer Learning ICLR 2026

Francisco Galuppo Azevedo, Clarissa Lima Loures, Denis Oliveira Correa

Training relational foundation models requires learning representations that transfer across tasks, yet available supervision is typically limited to a small number of prediction targets per database. This task scarcity causes learned representations to encode task-specific shortcuts that degrade transfer even within the same schema, a problem we call label leakage. We study this using K-Space, a modular architecture combining frozen pretrained tabular encoders with a lightweight message-passing core. To suppress leakage, we introduce a gradient projection method that removes label-predictive directions from representation updates. On RelBench, this improves within-dataset transfer by +0.145 AUROC on average, often recovering near single-task performance. Our results suggest that limited task diversity, not just limited data, constrains relational foundation models.

comment: Accepted at the 3rd DATA-FM Workshop at ICLR 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=nI2nsMMHXp

☆ $p$-adic Character Neural Network

Tomoki Mihara

We propose a new frame work of $p$-adic neural network. Unlike the original $p$-adic neural network by S.\ Albeverio, A.\ Khrennikov, and B.\ Tirrozi using a family of characteristic functions indexed by hyperparameters of precision as activation functions, we use a single injective $p$-adic character on the topological Abelian group $\mathbb{Z}_p$ of $p$-adic integers as an activation function. We prove the $p$-adic universal approximation theorem for this formulation of $p$-adic neural network, and reduce it to the feasibility problem of polynomial equations over the finite ring of integers modulo a power of $p$.

☆ DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA

Yi Chen, Yuying Ge, Hui Zhou, Mingyu Ding, Yixiao Ge, Xihui Liu

The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.

comment: Project page: https://xpeng-robotics.github.io/dial

☆ Toward Generalizable Whole Brain Representations with High-Resolution Light-Sheet Data CVPR 2026

Minyoung E. Kim, Dae Hee Yun, Aditi V. Patel, Madeline Hon, Webster Guan, Taegeon Lee, Brian Nguyen

Unprecedented visual details of biological structures are being revealed by subcellular-resolution whole-brain 3D microscopy data, enabled by recent advances in intact tissue processing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). These volumetric data offer rich morphological and spatial cellular information, however, the lack of scalable data processing and analysis methods tailored to these petabyte-scale data poses a substantial challenge for accurate interpretation. Further, existing models for visual tasks such as object detection and classification struggle to generalize to this type of data. To accelerate the development of suitable methods and foundational models, we present CANVAS, a comprehensive set of high-resolution whole mouse brain LSFM benchmark data, encompassing six neuronal and immune cell-type markers, along with cell annotations and a leaderboard. We also demonstrate challenges in generalization of baseline models built on existing architectures, especially due to the heterogeneity in cellular morphology across phenotypes and anatomical locations in the brain. To the best of our knowledge, CANVAS is the first and largest LSFM benchmark that captures intact mouse brain tissue at subcellular level, and includes extensive annotations of cells throughout the brain.

comment: 21 pages, 12 figures. Accepted at CVPR 2026

☆ DiSGMM: A Method for Time-varying Microscopic Weight Completion on Road Networks

Yan Lin, Jilin Hu, Shengnan Guo, Christian S. Jensen, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan

Microscopic road-network weights represent fine-grained, time-varying traffic conditions obtained from individual vehicles. An example is travel speeds associated with road segments as vehicles traverse them. These weights support tasks including traffic microsimulation and vehicle routing with reliability guarantees. We study the problem of time-varying microscopic weight completion. During a time slot, the available weights typically cover only some road segments. Weight completion recovers distributions for the weights of every road segment at the current time slot. This problem involves two challenges: (i) contending with two layers of sparsity, where weights are missing at both the network layer (many road segments lack weights) and the segment layer (a segment may have insufficient weights to enable accurate distribution estimation); and (ii) achieving a weight distribution representation that is closed-form and can capture complex conditions flexibly, including heavy tails and multiple clusters. To address these challenges, we propose DiSGMM that combines sparsity-aware embeddings with spatiotemporal modeling to leverage sparse known weights alongside learned segment properties and long-range correlations for distribution estimation. DiSGMM represents distributions of microscopic weights as learnable Gaussian mixture models, providing closed-form distributions capable of capturing complex conditions flexibly. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that DiSGMM can outperform state-of-the-art methods.

☆ Curvature-Guided LoRA: Steering in the pretrained NTK subspace

Frédéric Zheng, Alexandre Proutière

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA enable efficient adaptation of large pretrained models but often fall short of full fine-tuning performance. Existing approaches focus on aligning parameter updates, which only indirectly control model predictions. In this work, we introduce the prediction alignment problem, aiming to match the predictor obtained via PEFT to that of full fine-tuning at the level of outputs. We show that this objective naturally leads to a curvature-aware, second-order formulation, where optimal low-rank updates correspond to a Newton-like, curvature-whitened gradient. Based on this insight, we propose Curvature-Guided LoRA (CG-LoRA), which selects and scales adaptation directions using local curvature information. Our method is computationally efficient and avoids explicit second-order matrix construction. Preliminary experiments on standard natural language understanding benchmarks demonstrate improved performance and faster convergence compared to existing LoRA variants.

comment: Preprint

☆ Loss Gap Parity for Fairness in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Brahim Erraji, Michaël Perrot, Aurélien Bellet

While clients may join federated learning to improve performance on data they rarely observe locally, they often remain self-interested, expecting the global model to perform well on their own data. This motivates an objective that ensures all clients achieve a similar loss gap -the difference in performance between the global model and the best model they could train using only their local data-. To this end, we propose EAGLE, a novel federated learning algorithm that explicitly regularizes the global model to minimize disparities in loss gaps across clients. Our approach is particularly effective in heterogeneous settings, where the optimal local models of the clients may be misaligned. Unlike existing methods that encourage loss parity, potentially degrading performance for many clients, EAGLE targets fairness in relative improvements. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for EAGLE under non-convex loss functions, and characterize how its iterates perform relative to the standard federated learning objective using a novel heterogeneity measure. Empirically, we demonstrate that EAGLE reduces the disparity in loss gaps among clients by prioritizing those furthest from their local optimal loss, while maintaining competitive utility in both convex and non-convex cases compared to strong baselines.

comment: 9 Pages, Published to AISTATS 2026

☆ AMShortcut: An Inference- and Training-Efficient Inverse Design Model for Amorphous Materials

Yan Lin, Jonas A. Finkler, Tao Du, Jilin Hu, Morten M. Smedskjaer

Amorphous materials are solids that lack long-range atomic order but possess complex short- and medium-range order. Unlike crystalline materials that can be described by unit cells containing few up to hundreds of atoms, amorphous materials require larger simulation cells with at least hundreds or often thousands of atoms. Inverse design of amorphous materials with probabilistic generative models aims to generate the atomic positions and elements of amorphous materials given a set of desired properties. It has emerged as a promising approach for facilitating the application of amorphous materials in domains such as energy storage and thermal management. In this paper, we introduce AMShortcut, an inference- and training-efficient probabilistic generative model for amorphous materials. AMShortcut enables accurate inference of diverse short- and medium-range structures in amorphous materials with only a few sampling steps, mitigating the need for an excessive number of sampling steps that hinders inference efficiency. AMShortcut can be trained once with all relevant properties and perform inference conditioned on arbitrary combinations of desired properties, mitigating the need for training one model for each combination. Experiments on three amorphous materials datasets with diverse structures and properties demonstrate that AMShortcut achieves its design goals.

☆ From Density Matrices to Phase Transitions in Deep Learning: Spectral Early Warnings and Interpretability

Max Hennick, Guillaume Corlouer

A key problem in the modern study of AI is predicting and understanding emergent capabilities in models during training. Inspired by methods for studying reactions in quantum chemistry, we present the ``2-datapoint reduced density matrix". We show that this object provides a computationally efficient, unified observable of phase transitions during training. By tracking the eigenvalue statistics of the 2RDM over a sliding window, we derive two complementary signals: the spectral heat capacity, which we prove provides early warning of second-order phase transitions via critical slowing down, and the participation ratio, which reveals the dimensionality of the underlying reorganization. Remarkably, the top eigenvectors of the 2RDM are directly interpretable making it straightforward to study the nature of the transitions. We validate across four settings distinct settings: deep linear networks, induction head formation, grokking, and emergent misalignment. We then discuss directions for future work using the 2RDM.

☆ Multimodal Machine Learning for Early Prediction of Metastasis in a Swedish Multi-Cancer Cohort

Franco Rugolon, Korbinian Randl, Braslav Jovanovic, Ioanna Miliou, Panagiotis Papapetrou

Multimodal Machine Learning offers a holistic view of a patient's status, integrating structured and unstructured data from electronic health records (EHR). We propose a framework to predict metastasis risk one month prior to diagnosis, using six months of clinical history from EHR data. Data from four cancer cohorts collected at Karolinska University Hospital (Stockholm, Sweden) were analyzed: breast (n = 743), colon (n = 387), lung (n = 870), and prostate (n = 1890). The dataset included demographics, comorbidities, laboratory results, medications, and clinical text. We compared traditional and deep learning classifiers across single modalities and multimodal combinations, using various fusion strategies and a Transparent Reporting of a multivariable prediction model for Individual Prognosis Or Diagnosis (TRIPOD) 2a design, with an 80-20 development-validation split to ensure a rigorous, repeatable evaluation. Performance was evaluated using AUROC, AUPRC, F1 score, sensitivity, and specificity. We then employed a multimodal adaptation of SHAP to analyze the classifiers' reasoning. Intermediate fusion achieved the highest F1 scores on breast (0.845), colon (0.786), and prostate cancer (0.845), demonstrating strong predictive performance. For lung cancer, the intermediate fusion achieved an F1 score of 0.819, while the text-only model achieved the highest, with an F1 score of 0.829. Deep learning classifiers consistently outperformed traditional models. Colon cancer, the smallest cohort, had the lowest performance, highlighting the importance of sufficient training data. SHAP analysis showed that the relative importance of modalities varied across cancer types. Fusion strategies offer distinct strengths and weaknesses. Intermediate fusion consistently delivered the best results, but strategy choices should align with data characteristics and organizational needs.

☆ Reasoning-Driven Synthetic Data Generation and Evaluation

Tim R. Davidson, Benoit Seguin, Enrico Bacis, Cesar Ilharco, Hamza Harkous

Although many AI applications of interest require specialized multi-modal models, relevant data to train such models is inherently scarce or inaccessible. Filling these gaps with human annotators is prohibitively expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming, leading model builders to increasingly consider synthetic data as a scalable alternative. However, existing synthetic data generation methods often rely on manual prompts, evolutionary algorithms, or extensive seed data from the target distribution - limiting their scalability, explainability, and control. In this paper, we introduce Simula: a novel reasoning-driven framework for data generation and evaluation. It employs a seedless, agentic approach to generate synthetic datasets at scale, allowing users to define desired dataset characteristics through an explainable and controllable process that enables fine-grained resource allocation. We show the efficacy of our approach on a variety of datasets, rigorously testing both intrinsic and downstream properties. Our work (1) offers guidelines for synthetic data mechanism design, (2) provides insights into generating and evaluating synthetic data at scale, and (3) unlocks new opportunities for developing and deploying AI in domains where data scarcity or privacy concerns are paramount.

comment: Accepted to TMLR 2026, J2C Certification

☆ Big2Small: A Unifying Neural Network Framework for Model Compression

Jing-Xiao Liao, Haoran Wang, Tao Li, Daoming Lyu, Yi Zhang, Chengjun Cai, Feng-Lei Fan

With the development of foundational models, model compression has become a critical requirement. Various model compression approaches have been proposed such as low-rank decomposition, pruning, quantization, ergodic dynamic systems, and knowledge distillation, which are based on different heuristics. To elevate the field from fragmentation to a principled discipline, we construct a unifying mathematical framework for model compression grounded in measure theory. We further demonstrate that each model compression technique is mathematically equivalent to a neural network subject to a regularization. Building upon this mathematical and structural equivalence, we propose an experimentally-verified data-free model compression framework, termed \textit{Big2Small}, which translates Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) from data domain to the domain of network parameters. \textit{Big2Small} trains compact INRs to encode the weights of larger models and reconstruct the weights during inference. To enhance reconstruction fidelity, we introduce Outlier-Aware Preprocessing to handle extreme weight values and a Frequency-Aware Loss function to preserve high-frequency details. Experiments on image classification and segmentation demonstrate that \textit{Big2Small} achieves competitive accuracy and compression ratios compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

☆ Training-Free Dynamic Upcycling of Expert Language Models ICLR 2026

Eros Fanì, Oğuzhan Ersoy

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of specialized tasks, exhibiting strong problem-solving capabilities. However, training these models is prohibitively expensive, and they often lack domain-specific expertise because they rely on general knowledge datasets. Expertise finetuning can address this issue; however, it often leads to overspecialization, and developing a single multi-domain expert remains difficult due to diverging objectives. Furthermore, multitask training is challenging due to interference and catastrophic forgetting. Existing work proposes combining the expertise of dense models within a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, although this approach still requires multitask finetuning. To address these issues, we introduce Dynamic Upcycling MoE (DUME), a novel approach that reuses dense experts trained on different domains to construct a unified MoE model. Our method builds a single multitask model that preserves the capabilities of the original dense experts without requiring additional training. DUME is both cost-efficient and scalable: by leveraging the closed-form solution of ridge regression, it eliminates the need for further optimization and enables experts to be added dynamically while maintaining the model's original performance. We demonstrate that DUME consistently outperforms baseline approaches in both causal language modeling and reasoning settings. Finally, we also show that the DUME model can be fine-tuned to further improve performance. We show that, in the causal language modeling setting, DUME can retain up to 97.6% of a dense expert model specialized in one particular domain, and that it can also surpass it in the reasoning setting, where it can achieve 102.1% of the dense expert performance. Our code is available at: github.com/gensyn-ai/dume.

comment: Accepted at the ICLR 2026 Workshop on Scaling Post-training for LLMs

☆ One-for-All: A Lightweight Stabilized and Parameter-Efficient Pre-trained LLM for Time Series Forecasting

Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Bianca Schoen-Phelan

We address the challenge of adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for multivariate time-series analysis, where their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational and memory demands. Our solution, One-for-All, introduces Gaussian Rank-Stabilized Low-Rank Adapters (rsLoRA) to enable parameter-efficient fine-tuning of frozen LLMs. While inspired by LoRA, rsLoRA introduces a mathematically grounded rank-stabilization mechanism that enables provable gradient stability at low ranks a novel contribution absent in prior PEFT methods. Our framework injects trainable rank decomposition matrices (rank 16) into positional embeddings and output layers, while keeping self-attention weights fixed. This design reduces trainable parameters by 6.8$\times$ (vs. TimesNet), 21$\times$ (vs. GPT4TS), and 11.8$\times$ (vs. TIME-LLM), while achieving a 168-1,776$\times$ smaller memory footprint (2.2MiB vs. 340MiB-4.18GiB in SOTA models). Rigorous evaluation across six time-series tasks demonstrates that One-for-All achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy trade-offs: 5.5$\times$ higher parameter efficiency (MSE=5.50) than TimesNet and 21$\times$ better than GPT4TS, while matching their forecasting accuracy (MSE=0.33). The framework's stability is validated through consistent performance across diverse horizons (96-720 steps) and datasets (ETT, Weather, M3, M4), with 98.3% fewer parameters than conventional transformers. These advances enable deployment on edge devices for healthcare, finance, and environmental monitoring without compromising performance.

comment: This manuscript is currently under review at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

☆ HyperKKL: Learning KKL Observers for Non-Autonomous Nonlinear Systems via Hypernetwork-Based Input Conditioning

Yahia Salaheldin Shaaban, Abdelrahman Sayed Sayed, M. Umar B. Niazi, Karl Henrik Johansson

Kazantzis-Kravaris/Luenberger (KKL) observers are a class of state observers for nonlinear systems that rely on an injective map to transform the nonlinear dynamics into a stable quasi-linear latent space, from where the state estimate is obtained in the original coordinates via a left inverse of the transformation map. Current learning-based methods for these maps are designed exclusively for autonomous systems and do not generalize well to controlled or non-autonomous systems. In this paper, we propose two learning-based designs of neural KKL observers for non-autonomous systems whose dynamics are influenced by exogenous inputs. To this end, a hypernetwork-based framework ($HyperKKL$) is proposed with two input-conditioning strategies. First, an augmented observer approach ($HyperKKL_{obs}$) adds input-dependent corrections to the latent observer dynamics while retaining static transformation maps. Second, a dynamic observer approach ($HyperKKL_{dyn}$) employs a hypernetwork to generate encoder and decoder weights that are input-dependent, yielding time-varying transformation maps. We derive a theoretical worst-case bound on the state estimation error. Numerical evaluations on four nonlinear benchmark systems show that input conditioning yields consistent improvements in estimation accuracy over static autonomous maps, with an average symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE) reduction of 29% across all non-zero input regimes.

comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2026

☆ mlr3mbo: Bayesian Optimization in R

Marc Becker, Lennart Schneider, Martin Binder, Lars Kotthoff, Bernd Bischl

We present mlr3mbo, a comprehensive and modular toolbox for Bayesian optimization in R. mlr3mbo supports single- and multi-objective optimization, multi-point proposals, batch and asynchronous parallelization, input and output transformations, and robust error handling. While it can be used for many standard Bayesian optimization variants in applied settings, researchers can also construct custom BO algorithms from its flexible building blocks. In addition to an introduction to the software, its design principles, and its building blocks, the paper presents two extensive empirical evaluations of the software on the surrogate-based benchmark suite YAHPO Gym. To identify robust default configurations for both numeric and mixed-hierarchical optimization regimes, and to gain further insights into the respective impacts of individual settings, we run a coordinate descent search over the mlr3mbo configuration space and analyze its results. Furthermore, we demonstrate that mlr3mbo achieves state-of-the-art performance by benchmarking it against a wide range of optimizers, including HEBO, SMAC3, Ax, and Optuna.

☆ Unbounded Density Ratio Estimation and Its Application to Covariate Shift Adaptation

Ren-Rui Liu, Jun Fan, Lei Shi, Zheng-Chu Guo

This paper focuses on the problem of unbounded density ratio estimation -- an understudied yet critical challenge in statistical learning -- and its application to covariate shift adaptation. Much of the existing literature assumes that the density ratio is either uniformly bounded or unbounded but known exactly. These conditions are often violated in practice, creating a gap between theoretical guarantees and real-world applicability. In contrast, this work directly addresses unbounded density ratios and integrates them into importance weighting for effective covariate shift adaptation. We propose a three-step estimation method that leverages unlabeled data from both the source and target distributions: (1) estimating a relative density ratio; (2) applying a truncation operation to control its unboundedness; and (3) transforming the truncated estimate back into the standard density ratio. The estimated density ratio is then employed as importance weights for regression under covariate shift. We establish rigorous, non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for both the proposed density ratio estimator and the resulting regression function estimator, demonstrating optimal or near-optimal convergence rates. Our findings offer new theoretical insights into density ratio estimation and learning under covariate shift, extending classical learning theory to more practical and challenging scenarios.

comment: 48 pages, 1 figure, 1 table

☆ Nonnegative Matrix Factorization in the Component-Wise L1 Norm for Sparse Data

Giovanni Seraghiti, Kévin Dubrulle, Arnaud Vandaele, Nicolas Gillis

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) approximates a nonnegative matrix, $X$, by the product of two nonnegative factors, $WH$, where $W$ has $r$ columns and $H$ has $r$ rows. In this paper, we consider NMF using the component-wise L1 norm as the error measure (L1-NMF), which is suited for data corrupted by heavy-tailed noise, such as Laplace noise or salt and pepper noise, or in the presence of outliers. Our first contribution is an NP-hardness proof for L1-NMF, even when $r=1$, in contrast to the standard NMF that uses least squares. Our second contribution is to show that L1-NMF strongly enforces sparsity in the factors for sparse input matrices, thereby favoring interpretability. However, if the data is affected by false zeros, too sparse solutions might degrade the model. Our third contribution is a new, more general, L1-NMF model for sparse data, dubbed weighted L1-NMF (wL1-NMF), where the sparsity of the factorization is controlled by adding a penalization parameter to the entries of $WH$ associated with zeros in the data. The fourth contribution is a new coordinate descent (CD) approach for wL1-NMF, denoted as sparse CD (sCD), where each subproblem is solved by a weighted median algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, sCD is the first algorithm for L1-NMF whose complexity scales with the number of nonzero entries in the data, making it efficient in handling large-scale, sparse data. We perform extensive numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data to show the effectiveness of our new proposed model (wL1-NMF) and algorithm (sCD).

comment: 21 pages before supplementary, code available from https://github.com/giovanniseraghiti/wL1-NMF

☆ Symphony for Medical Coding: A Next-Generation Agentic System for Scalable and Explainable Medical Coding

Joakim Edin, Andreas Motzfeldt, Simon Flachs, Lars Maaløe

Medical coding translates free-text clinical documentation into standardized codes drawn from classification systems that contain tens of thousands of entries and are updated annually. It is central to billing, clinical research, and quality reporting, yet remains largely manual, slow, and error-prone. Existing automated approaches learn to predict a fixed set of codes from labeled data, thereby preventing adaptation to new codes or different coding systems without retraining on different data. They also provide no explanation for their predictions, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. We introduce Symphony for Medical Coding, a system that approaches the task the way expert human coders do: by reasoning over the clinical narrative with direct access to the coding guidelines. This design allows Symphony to operate across any coding system and to provide span-level evidence linking each predicted code to the text that supports it. We evaluate on two public benchmarks and three real-world datasets spanning inpatient, outpatient, emergency, and subspecialty settings across the United States and the United Kingdom. Symphony achieves state-of-the-art results across all settings, establishing itself as a flexible, deployment-ready foundation for automated clinical coding.

☆ Mind the Gap: A Framework for Assessing Pitfalls in Multimodal Active Learning

Dustin Eisenhardt, Yunhee Jeong, Florian Buettner

Multimodal learning enables neural networks to integrate information from heterogeneous sources, but active learning in this setting faces distinct challenges. These include missing modalities, differences in modality difficulty, and varying interaction structures. These are issues absent in the unimodal case. While the behavior of active learning strategies in unimodal settings is well characterized, their behavior under such multimodal conditions remains poorly understood. We introduce a new framework for benchmarking multimodal active learning that isolates these pitfalls using synthetic datasets, allowing systematic evaluation without confounding noise. Using this framework, we compare unimodal and multimodal query strategies and validate our findings on two real-world datasets. Our results show that models consistently develop imbalanced representations, relying primarily on one modality while neglecting others. Existing query methods do not mitigate this effect, and multimodal strategies do not consistently outperform unimodal ones. These findings highlight limitations of current active learning methods and underline the need for modality-aware query strategies that explicitly address these pitfalls. Code and benchmark resources will be made publicly available.

☆ A Comprehensive Information-Decomposition Analysis of Large Vision-Language Models ICLR 2026

Lixin Xiu, Xufang Luo, Hideki Nakayama

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve impressive performance, yet their internal decision-making processes remain opaque, making it difficult to determine if the success stems from true multimodal fusion or from reliance on unimodal priors. To address this attribution gap, we introduce a novel framework using partial information decomposition (PID) to quantitatively measure the "information spectrum" of LVLMs -- decomposing a model's decision-relevant information into redundant, unique, and synergistic components. By adapting a scalable estimator to modern LVLM outputs, our model-agnostic pipeline profiles 26 LVLMs on four datasets across three dimensions -- breadth (cross-model & cross-task), depth (layer-wise information dynamics), and time (learning dynamics across training). Our analysis reveals two key results: (i) two task regimes (synergy-driven vs. knowledge-driven) and (ii) two stable, contrasting family-level strategies (fusion-centric vs. language-centric). We also uncover a consistent three-phase pattern in layer-wise processing and identify visual instruction tuning as the key stage where fusion is learned. Together, these contributions provide a quantitative lens beyond accuracy-only evaluation and offer insights for analyzing and designing the next generation of LVLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/RiiShin/pid-lvlm-analysis .

comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026. Project page: https://riishin.github.io/pid-lvlm-iclr26/

☆ Concept frustration: Aligning human concepts and machine representations

Enrico Parisini, Christopher J. Soelistyo, Ahab Isaac, Alessandro Barp, Christopher R. S. Banerji

Aligning human-interpretable concepts with the internal representations learned by modern machine learning systems remains a central challenge for interpretable AI. We introduce a geometric framework for comparing supervised human concepts with unsupervised intermediate representations extracted from foundation model embeddings. Motivated by the role of conceptual leaps in scientific discovery, we formalise the notion of concept frustration: a contradiction that arises when an unobserved concept induces relationships between known concepts that cannot be made consistent within an existing ontology. We develop task-aligned similarity measures that detect concept frustration between supervised concept-based models and unsupervised representations derived from foundation models, and show that the phenomenon is detectable in task-aligned geometry while conventional Euclidean comparisons fail. Under a linear-Gaussian generative model we derive a closed-form expression for Bayes-optimal concept-based classifier accuracy, decomposing predictive signal into known-known, known-unknown and unknown-unknown contributions and identifying analytically where frustration affects performance. Experiments on synthetic data and real language and vision tasks demonstrate that frustration can be detected in foundation model representations and that incorporating a frustrating concept into an interpretable model reorganises the geometry of learned concept representations, to better align human and machine reasoning. These results suggest a principled framework for diagnosing incomplete concept ontologies and aligning human and machine conceptual reasoning, with implications for the development and validation of safe interpretable AI for high-risk applications.

comment: 34 pages, 7 figures

☆ Disentangled Graph Prompting for Out-Of-Distribution Detection

Cheng Yang, Yu Hao, Qi Zhang, Chuan Shi

When testing data and training data come from different distributions, deep neural networks (DNNs) will face significant safety risks in practical applications. Therefore, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection techniques, which can identify OOD samples at test time and alert the system, are urgently needed. Existing graph OOD detection methods usually characterize fine-grained in-distribution (ID) patterns from multiple perspectives, and train end-to-end graph neural networks (GNNs) for prediction. However, due to the unavailability of OOD data during training, the absence of explicit supervision signals could lead to sub-optimal performance of end-to-end encoders. To address this issue, we follow the pre-training+prompting paradigm to utilize pre-trained GNN encoders, and propose Disentangled Graph Prompting (DGP), to capture fine-grained ID patterns with the help of ID graph labels. Specifically, we design two prompt generators that respectively generate class-specific and class-agnostic prompt graphs by modifying the edge weights of an input graph. We also design several effective losses to train the prompt generators and prevent trivial solutions. We conduct extensive experiments on ten datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DGP, which achieves a relative AUC improvement of 3.63% over the best graph OOD detection baseline. Ablation studies and hyper-parameter experiments further show the effectiveness of DGP. Code is available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/DGP.

comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

☆ Central limit theorems for the outputs of fully convolutional neural networks with time series input

Annika Betken, Giorgio Micali, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Deep learning is widely deployed for time series learning tasks such as classification and forecasting. Despite the empirical successes, only little theory has been developed so far in the time series context. In this work, we prove that if the network inputs are generated from short-range dependent linear processes, the outputs of fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) with global average pooling (GAP) are asymptotically Gaussian and the limit is attained if the length of the observed time series tends to infinity. The proof leverages existing tools from the theoretical time series literature. Based on our theory, we propose a generalization of the GAP layer by considering a global weighted pooling step with slowly varying, learnable coefficients.

☆ The Geometry of Polynomial Group Convolutional Neural Networks

Yacoub Hendi, Daniel Persson, Magdalena Larfors

We study polynomial group convolutional neural networks (PGCNNs) for an arbitrary finite group $G$. In particular, we introduce a new mathematical framework for PGCNNs using the language of graded group algebras. This framework yields two natural parametrizations of the architecture, based on Hadamard and Kronecker products, related by a linear map. We compute the dimension of the associated neuromanifold, verifying that it depends only on the number of layers and the size of the group. We also describe the general fiber of the Kronecker parametrization up to the regular group action and rescaling, and conjecture the analogous description for the Hadamard parametrization. Our conjecture is supported by explicit computations for small groups and shallow networks.

comment: 22 pages, 2 figures

☆ Total Variation Guarantees for Sampling with Stochastic Localization

Jakob Kellermann

Motivated by the success of score-based generative models, a number of diffusion-based algorithms have recently been proposed for the problem of sampling from a probability measure whose unnormalized density can be accessed. Among them, Grenioux et al. introduced SLIPS, a sampling algorithm based on Stochastic Localization. While SLIPS exhibits strong empirical performance, no rigorous convergence analysis has previously been provided. In this work, we close this gap by establishing the first guarantee for SLIPS in total variation distance. Under minimal assumptions on the target, our bound implies that the number of steps required to achieve an $\varepsilon$-guarantee scales linearly with the dimension, up to logarithmic factors. The analysis leverages techniques from the theory of score-based generative models and further provides theoretical insights into the empirically observed optimal choice of discretization points.

comment: 12 pages main body, 13 pages Appendix

☆ Capturing Multivariate Dependencies of EV Charging Events: From Parametric Copulas to Neural Density Estimation

Martin Výboh, Gabriela Grmanová

Accurate event-based modeling of electric vehicle (EV) charging is essential for grid reliability and smart-charging design. While traditional statistical methods capture marginal distributions, they often fail to model the complex, non-linear dependencies between charging variables, specifically arrival times, durations, and energy demand. This paper addresses this gap by introducing the first application of Vine copulas and Copula Density Neural Estimation framework (CODINE) to the EV domain. We evaluate these high-capacity dependence models across three diverse real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that by explicitly focusing on modeling the joint dependence structure, Vine copulas and CODINE outperform established parametric families and remain highly competitive against state-of-the-art benchmarks like conditional Gaussian Mixture Model Networks. We show that these methods offer superior preservation of tail behaviors and correlation structures, providing a robust framework for synthetic charging event generation in varied infrastructure contexts.

comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to IEEE PES ISGT Europe 2026

☆ Bringing Up a Bilingual BabyLM: Investigating Multilingual Language Acquisition Using Small-Scale Models

Linda Zeng, Steven Y. Feng, Michael C. Frank

Multilingualism is incredibly common around the world, leading to many important theoretical and practical questions about how children learn multiple languages at once. For example, does multilingual acquisition lead to delays in learning? Are there better and worse ways to structure multilingual input? Many correlational studies address these questions, but it is surprisingly difficult to get definitive answers because children cannot be randomly assigned to be multilingual and data are typically not matched between languages. We use language model training as a method for simulating a variety of highly controlled exposure conditions, and create matched 100M-word mono- and bilingual datasets using synthetic data and machine translation. We train GPT-2 models on monolingual and bilingual data organized to reflect a range of exposure regimes, and evaluate their performance on perplexity, grammaticality, and semantic knowledge. Across model scales and measures, bilingual models perform similarly to monolingual models in one language, but show strong performance in the second language as well. These results suggest that there are no strong differences between different bilingual exposure regimes, and that bilingual input poses no in-principle challenges for agnostic statistical learners.

comment: Code and data at https://github.com/styfeng/bilingual-babyLM

☆ Learning Surrogate LPV State-Space Models with Uncertainty Quantification

E. Javier Olucha, Valentin Preda, Amritam Das, Roland Tóth

The Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) framework enables the construction of surrogate models of complex nonlinear and high-dimensional systems, facilitating efficient stability and performance analysis together with controller design. Despite significant advances in data-driven LPV modelling, existing approaches do not quantify the uncertainty of the obtained LPV models. Consequently, assessing model reliability for analysis and control or detecting operation outside the training regime requires extensive validation and user expertise. This paper proposes a Bayesian approach for the joint estimation of LPV state-space models together with their scheduling, providing a characterization of model uncertainty and confidence bounds on the predicted model response directly from input-output data. Both aleatoric uncertainty due to measurement noise and epistemic uncertainty arising from limited training data and structural bias are considered. The resulting model preserves the LPV structure required for controller synthesis while enabling computationally efficient simulation and uncertainty propagation. The approach is demonstrated on the surrogate modelling of a two-dimensional nonlinear interconnection of mass-spring-damper systems.

comment: Preprint submitted to the 65th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

☆ Sampling at intermediate temperatures is optimal for training large language models in protein structure prediction

L. Ghiringhelli, A. Zambon, G. Tiana

We investigate the parameter space of transformer models trained on protein sequence data using a statistical mechanics framework, sampling the loss landscape at varying temperatures by Langevin dynamics to characterize the low-loss manifold and understand the mechanisms underlying the superior performance of transformers in protein structure prediction. We find that, at variance with feedforward networks, the lack of a first--order--like transition in the loss of the transformer produces a range of intermediate temperatures with good learning properties. We show that the parameters of most layers are highly conserved at these temperatures if the dimension of the embedding is optimal, and we provide an operative way to find this dimension. Finally, we show that the attention matrix is more predictive of the contact maps of the protein at higher temperatures and for higher dimensions of the embedding than those optimal for learning.

☆ Baby Scale: Investigating Models Trained on Individual Children's Language Input

Steven Y. Feng, Alvin W. M. Tan, Michael C. Frank

Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires benchmarking LMs on human-scale datasets to understand how linguistic knowledge emerges from children's natural training data. Using transcripts from the BabyView dataset (videos from children ages 6-36 months), we investigate (1) scaling performance at child-scale data regimes, (2) variability in model performance across datasets from different children's experiences and linguistic predictors of dataset quality, and (3) relationships between model and child language learning outcomes. LMs trained on child data show acceptable scaling for grammar tasks, but lower scaling on semantic and world knowledge tasks than models trained on synthetic data; we also observe substantial variability on data from different children. Beyond dataset size, performance is most associated with a combination of distributional and interactional linguistic features, broadly consistent with what makes high-quality input for child language development. Finally, model likelihoods for individual words correlate with children's learning of those words, suggesting that properties of child-directed input may influence both model learning and human language development. Overall, understanding what properties make language data efficient for learning can enable more powerful small-scale language models while also shedding light on human language acquisition.

comment: Code and data at https://github.com/styfeng/babyscale-LM

☆ Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

David Gonzalez, Alba Muixi, Beatriz Moya, Elias Cueto

The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

☆ Target-Aligned Reinforcement Learning

Leonard S. Pleiss, James Harrison, Maximilian Schiffer

Many reinforcement learning algorithms rely on target networks - lagged copies of the online network - to stabilize training. While effective, this mechanism introduces a fundamental stability-recency tradeoff: slower target updates improve stability but reduce the recency of learning signals, hindering convergence speed. We propose Target-Aligned Reinforcement Learning (TARL), a framework that emphasizes transitions for which the target and online network estimates are highly aligned. By focusing updates on well-aligned targets, TARL mitigates the adverse effects of stale target estimates while retaining the stabilizing benefits of target networks. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that target alignment correction accelerates convergence, and empirically demonstrate consistent improvements over standard reinforcement learning algorithms across various benchmark environments.

☆ Learning to Generate Formally Verifiable Step-by-Step Logic Reasoning via Structured Formal Intermediaries

Luoxin Chen, Yichi Zhou, Huishuai Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance on complex, multi-step reasoning tasks, especially when post-trained with outcome-rewarded reinforcement learning Guo et al. 2025. However, it has been observed that outcome rewards often overlook flawed intermediate steps, leading to unreliable reasoning steps even when final answers are correct. To address this unreliable reasoning, we propose PRoSFI (Process Reward over Structured Formal Intermediates), a novel reward method that enhances reasoning reliability without compromising accuracy. Instead of generating formal proofs directly, which is rarely accomplishable for a modest-sized (7B) model, the model outputs structured intermediate steps aligned with its natural language reasoning. Each step is then verified by a formal prover. Only fully validated reasoning chains receive high rewards. The integration of formal verification guides the model towards generating step-by-step machine-checkable proofs, thereby yielding more credible final answers. PRoSFI offers a simple and effective approach to training trustworthy reasoning models.

comment: 19 pages

☆ Model Predictive Path Integral PID Control for Learning-Based Path Following

Teruki Kato, Koshi Oishi, Seigo Ito

Classical proportional--integral--derivative (PID) control is widely employed in industrial applications; however, achieving higher performance often motivates the adoption of model predictive control (MPC). Although gradient-based methods are the standard for real-time optimization, sampling-based approaches have recently gained attention. In particular, model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables gradient-free optimization and accommodates non-differentiable models and objective functions. However, directly sampling control input sequences may yield discontinuous inputs and increase the optimization dimensionality in proportion to the prediction horizon. This study proposes MPPI--PID control, which applies MPPI to optimize PID gains at each control step, thereby replacing direct high-dimensional input-sequence optimization with low-dimensional gain-space optimization. This formulation enhances sample efficiency and yields smoother inputs via the PID structure. We also provide theoretical insights, including an information-theoretic interpretation that unifies MPPI and MPPI--PID, an analysis of the effect of optimization dimensionality on sample efficiency, and a characterization of input continuity induced by the PID structure. The proposed method is evaluated on the learning-based path following of a mini forklift using a residual-learning dynamics model that integrates a physical model with a neural network. System identification is performed with real driving data. Numerical path-following experiments demonstrate that MPPI--PID improves tracking performance compared with fixed-gain PID and achieves performance comparable to conventional MPPI while significantly reducing input increments. Furthermore, the proposed method maintains favorable performance even with substantially fewer samples, demonstrating its improved sample efficiency.

comment: Submitted to IFAC Journal of Systems and Control

☆ Metriplector: From Field Theory to Neural Architecture

Dan Oprisa, Peter Toth

We present Metriplector, a neural architecture primitive in which the input configures an abstract physical system -- fields, sources, and operators -- and the dynamics of that system is the computation. Multiple fields evolve via coupled metriplectic dynamics, and the stress-energy tensor $T^{μν}$, derived from Noether's theorem, provides the readout. The metriplectic formulation admits a natural spectrum of instantiations: the dissipative branch alone yields a screened Poisson equation solved exactly via conjugate gradient; activating the full structure -- including the antisymmetric Poisson bracket -- gives field dynamics for image recognition and language modeling. We evaluate Metriplector across four domains, each using a task-specific architecture built from this shared primitive with progressively richer physics: F1=1.0 on maze pathfinding, generalizing from 15x15 training grids to unseen 39x39 grids; 97.2% exact Sudoku solve rate with zero structural injection; 81.03% on CIFAR-100 with 2.26M parameters; and 1.182 bits/byte on language modeling with 3.6x fewer training tokens than a GPT baseline.

comment: 30 pages, 7 figures

☆ Why not to use Cosine Similarity between Label Representations

Beatrix M. G. Nielsen

Cosine similarity is often used to measure the similarity of vectors. These vectors might be the representations of neural network models. However, it is not guaranteed that cosine similarity of model representations will tell us anything about model behaviour. In this paper we show that when using a softmax classifier, be it an image classifier or an autoregressive language model, measuring the cosine similarity between label representations (called unembeddings in the paper) does not give any information on the probabilities assigned by the model. Specifically, we prove that for any softmax classifier model, given two label representations, it is possible to make another model which gives the same probabilities for all labels and inputs, but where the cosine similarity between the representations is now either 1 or -1. We give specific examples of models with very high or low cosine simlarity between representations and show how to we can make equivalent models where the cosine similarity is now -1 or 1. This translation ambiguity can be fixed by centering the label representations, however, labels with representations with low cosine similarity can still have high probability for the same inputs. Fixing the length of the representations still does not give a guarantee that high(or low) cosine similarity will give high(or low) probability to the labels for the same inputs. This means that when working with softmax classifiers, cosine similarity values between label representations should not be used to explain model probabilities.

☆ Survival In-Context: Prior-fitted In-context Learning Tabular Foundation Model for Survival Analysis

Dmitrii Seletkov, Paul Hager, Rickmer Braren, Daniel Rueckert, Raphael Rehms

Survival analysis is crucial for many medical applications but remains challenging for modern machine learning due to limited data, censoring, and the heterogeneity of tabular covariates. While the prior-fitted paradigm, which relies on pretraining models on large collections of synthetic datasets, has recently facilitated tabular foundation models for classification and regression, its suitability for time-to-event modeling remains unclear. We propose a flexible survival data generation framework that defines a rich survival prior with explicit control over covariates and time-event distributions. Building on this prior, we introduce Survival In-Context (SIC), a prior-fitted in-context learning model for survival analysis that is pretrained exclusively on synthetic data. SIC produces individualized survival prediction in a single forward pass, requiring no task-specific training or hyperparameter tuning. Across a broad evaluation on real-world survival datasets, SIC achieves competitive or superior performance compared to classical and deep survival models, particularly in medium-sized data regimes, highlighting the promise of prior-fitted foundation models for survival analysis. The code will be made available upon publication.

☆ From Big Data to Fast Data: Towards High-Quality Datasets for Machine Learning Applications from Closed-Loop Data Collection

Philipp Reis, Jacqueline Henle, Stefan Otten, Eric Sax

The increasing capabilities of machine learning models, such as vision-language and multimodal language models, are placing growing demands on data in automotive systems engineering, making the quality and relevance of collected data enablers for the development and validation of such systems. Traditional Big Data approaches focus on large-scale data collection and offline processing, while Smart Data approaches improve data selection strategies but still rely on centralized and offline post-processing. This paper introduces the concept of Fast Data for automotive systems engineering. The approach shifts data selection and recording onto the vehicle as the data source. By enabling real-time, context-aware decisions on whether and which data should be recorded, data collection can be directly aligned with data quality objectives and collection strategies within a closed-loop. This results in datasets with higher relevance, improved coverage of critical scenarios, and increased information density, while at the same time reducing irrelevant data and associated costs. The proposed approach provides a structured foundation for designing data collection strategies that are aligned with the needs of modern machine learning algorithms. It supports efficient data acquisition and contributes to scalable and cost-effective ML development processes in automotive systems engineering.

comment: Submitted to IEEE ISSE 2026

☆ An Isotropic Approach to Efficient Uncertainty Quantification with Gradient Norms

Nils Grünefeld, Jes Frellsen, Christian Hardmeier

Existing methods for quantifying predictive uncertainty in neural networks are either computationally intractable for large language models or require access to training data that is typically unavailable. We derive a lightweight alternative through two approximations: a first-order Taylor expansion that expresses uncertainty in terms of the gradient of the prediction and the parameter covariance, and an isotropy assumption on the parameter covariance. Together, these yield epistemic uncertainty as the squared gradient norm and aleatoric uncertainty as the Bernoulli variance of the point prediction, from a single forward-backward pass through an unmodified pretrained model. We justify the isotropy assumption by showing that covariance estimates built from non-training data introduce structured distortions that isotropic covariance avoids, and that theoretical results on the spectral properties of large networks support the approximation at scale. Validation against reference Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimates on synthetic problems shows strong correspondence that improves with model size. We then use the estimates to investigate when each uncertainty type carries useful signal for predicting answer correctness in question answering with large language models, revealing a benchmark-dependent divergence: the combined estimate achieves the highest mean AUROC on TruthfulQA, where questions involve genuine conflict between plausible answers, but falls to near chance on TriviaQA's factual recall, suggesting that parameter-level uncertainty captures a fundamentally different signal than self-assessment methods.

☆ mtslearn: Machine Learning in Python for Medical Time Series

Zhongheng Jiang, Yuechao Zhao, Donglin Xie, Chenxi Sun, Rongchen Lu, Silu Luo, Zisheng Liang, Shenda Hong

Medical time-series data captures the dynamic progression of patient conditions, playing a vital role in modern clinical decision support systems. However, real-world clinical data is highly heterogeneous and inconsistently formatted. Furthermore, existing machine learning tools often have steep learning curves and fragmented workflows. Consequently, a significant gap remains between cutting-edge AI technologies and clinical application. To address this, we introduce mtslearn, an end-to-end integrated toolkit specifically designed for medical time-series data. First, the framework provides a unified data interface that automates the parsing and alignment of wide, long, and flat data formats. This design significantly reduces data cleaning overhead. Building on this, mtslearn provides a complete pipeline from data reading and feature engineering to model training and result visualization. Furthermore, it offers flexible interfaces for custom algorithms. Through a modular design, mtslearn simplifies complex data engineering tasks into a few lines of code. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for clinicians with limited programming experience, empowering them to focus more on exploring medical hypotheses and accelerating the translation of advanced algorithms into real-world clinical practice. mtslearn is publicly available at https://github.com/PKUDigitalHealth/mtslearn.

☆ Multi-AUV Cooperative Target Tracking Based on Supervised Diffusion-Aided Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Jiaao Ma, Chuan Lin, Guangjie Han, Shengchao Zhu, Zhenyu Wang, Chen An

In recent years, advances in underwater networking and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) have significantly expanded multi-autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) applications in marine exploration and target tracking. However, current MARL-driven cooperative tracking faces three critical challenges: 1) non-stationarity in decentralized coordination, where local policy updates destabilize teammates' observation spaces, preventing convergence; 2) sparse-reward exploration inefficiency from limited underwater visibility and constrained sensor ranges, causing high-variance learning; and 3) water disturbance fragility combined with handcrafted reward dependency that degrades real-world robustness under unmodeled hydrodynamic conditions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hierarchical MARL architecture comprising four layers: global training scheduling, multi-agent coordination, local decision-making, and real-time execution. This architecture optimizes task allocation and inter-AUV coordination through hierarchical decomposition. Building on this foundation, we propose the Supervised Diffusion-Aided MARL (SDA-MARL) algorithm featuring three innovations: 1) a dual-decision architecture with segregated experience pools mitigating nonstationarity through structured experience replay; 2) a supervised learning mechanism guiding the diffusion model's reverse denoising process to generate high-fidelity training samples that accelerate convergence; and 3) disturbance-robust policy learning incorporating behavioral cloning loss to guide the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient network update using high-quality replay actions, eliminating handcrafted reward dependency. The tracking algorithm based on SDA-MARL proposed in this paper achieves superior precision compared to state-of-the-art methods in comprehensive underwater simulations.

☆ AGFT: Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness of Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026

Yubo Cui, Xianchao Guan, Zijun Xiong, Zheng Zhang

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization but remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing classification-guided adversarial fine-tuning methods often disrupt pre-trained cross-modal alignment, weakening visual-textual correspondence and degrading zero-shot performance. In this paper, we propose an Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning (AGFT) framework that enhances zero-shot adversarial robustness while preserving the cross-modal semantic structure. Unlike label-based methods that rely on hard labels and fail to maintain the relative relationships between image and text, AGFT leverages the probabilistic predictions of the original model for text-guided adversarial training, which aligns adversarial visual features with textual embeddings via soft alignment distributions, improving zero-shot adversarial robustness. To address structural discrepancies introduced by fine-tuning, we introduce a distribution consistency calibration mechanism that adjusts the robust model output to match a temperature-scaled version of the pre-trained model predictions. Extensive experiments across multiple zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that AGFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving zero-shot adversarial robustness.

comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026; Code is available at \url{https://github.com/YuboCui/AGFT}

☆ Hybrid Quantum-Classical Spatiotemporal Forecasting for 3D Cloud Fields

Fu Wang, Qifeng Lu, Xinyu Long, Meng Zhang, Xiaofei Yang, Weijia Cao, Xiaowen Chu

Accurate forecasting of three-dimensional (3D) cloud fields is important for atmospheric analysis and short-range numerical weather prediction, yet it remains challenging because cloud evolution involves cross-layer interactions, nonlocal dependencies, and multiscale spatiotemporal dynamics. Existing spatiotemporal prediction models based on convolutions, recurrence, or attention often rely on locality-biased representations and therefore struggle to preserve fine cloud structures in volumetric forecasting tasks. To address this issue, we propose QENO, a hybrid quantum-inspired spatiotemporal forecasting framework for 3D cloud fields. The proposed architecture consists of four components: a classical spatiotemporal encoder for compact latent representation, a topology-aware quantum enhancement block for modeling nonlocal couplings in latent space, a dynamic fusion temporal unit for integrating measurement-derived quantum features with recurrent memory, and a decoder for reconstructing future cloud volumes. Experiments on CMA-MESO 3D cloud fields show that QENO consistently outperforms representative baselines, including ConvLSTM, PredRNN++, Earthformer, TAU, and SimVP variants, in terms of MSE, MAE, RMSE, SSIM, and threshold-based detection metrics. In particular, QENO achieves an MSE of 0.2038, an RMSE of 0.4514, and an SSIM of 0.6291, while also maintaining a compact parameter budget. These results indicate that topology-aware hybrid quantum-classical feature modeling is a promising direction for 3D cloud structure forecasting and atmospheric Earth observation data analysis.

☆ PRISM: PRIor from corpus Statistics for topic Modeling

Tal Ishon, Yoav Goldberg, Uri Shaham

Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent semantic structure in text, with LDA providing a foundational probabilistic framework. While recent methods often incorporate external knowledge (e.g., pre-trained embeddings), such reliance limits applicability in emerging or underexplored domains. We introduce \textbf{PRISM}, a corpus-intrinsic method that derives a Dirichlet parameter from word co-occurrence statistics to initialize LDA without altering its generative process. Experiments on text and single cell RNA-seq data show that PRISM improves topic coherence and interpretability, rivaling models that rely on external knowledge. These results underscore the value of corpus-driven initialization for topic modeling in resource-constrained settings. Code is available at: https://github.com/shaham-lab/PRISM.

☆ Causality-inspired Federated Learning for Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs

Yuxuan Liu, Wenchao Xu, Haozhao Wang, Zhiming He, Zhaofeng Shi, Chongyang Xu, Peichao Wang, Boyuan Zhang

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized training of graph neural networks while preserving data privacy. However, existing FGL methods are predominantly designed for static graphs and rely on parameter averaging or distribution alignment, which implicitly assume that all features are equally transferable across clients, overlooking both the spatial and temporal heterogeneity and the presence of client-specific knowledge in real-world graphs. In this work, we identify that such assumptions create a vicious cycle of spurious representation entanglement, client-specific interference, and negative transfer, degrading generalization performance in Federated Learning over Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs (FSTG). To address this issue, we propose a novel causality-inspired framework named SC-FSGL, which explicitly decouples transferable causal knowledge from client-specific noise through representation-level interventions. Specifically, we introduce a Conditional Separation Module that simulates soft interventions through client conditioned masks, enabling the disentanglement of invariant spatio-temporal causal factors from spurious signals and mitigating representation entanglement caused by client heterogeneity. In addition, we propose a Causal Codebook that clusters causal prototypes and aligns local representations via contrastive learning, promoting cross-client consistency and facilitating knowledge sharing across diverse spatio-temporal patterns. Experiments on five diverse heterogeneity Spatio-Temporal Graph (STG) datasets show that SC-FSGL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

☆ Deep Learning-Assisted Improved Differential Fault Attacks on Lightweight Stream Ciphers

Kok Ping Lim, Dongyang Jia, Iftekhar Salam

Lightweight cryptographic primitives are widely deployed in resource-constraint environment, particularly in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Due to their public accessibility, these devices are vulnerable to physical attacks, especially fault attacks. Recently, deep learning-based cryptanalytic techniques have demonstrated promising results; however, their application to fault attacks remains limited, particularly for stream ciphers. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of deep learning assisted differential fault attack on three lightweight stream ciphers, namely ACORNv3, MORUSv2 and ATOM, under a relaxed fault model, where a single-bit bit-flipping fault is injected at an unknown location. We train multilayer perceptron (MLP) models to identify the fault locations. Experimental results show that the trained models achieve high identification accuracies of 0.999880, 0.999231 and 0.823568 for ACORNv3, MORUSv2 and ATOM, respectively, and outperform traditional signature-based methods. For the secret recovery process, we introduce a threshold-based method to optimize the number of fault injections required to recover the secret information. The results show that the initial state of ACORN can be recovered with 21 to 34 faults; while MORUS requires 213 to 248 faults, with at most 6 bits of guessing. Both attacks reduce the attack complexity compared to existing works. For ATOM, the results show that it possesses a higher security margin, as majority of state bits in the Non-linear Feedback Shift Register (NFSR) can only be recovered under a precise control model. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first experimental results of differential fault attacks on ATOM.

☆ Finite-time analysis of Multi-timescale Stochastic Optimization Algorithms

Kaustubh Kartikey, Shalabh Bhatnagar

We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based algorithm that estimates both the gradient and the Hessian of the objective function $J$. Both algorithms involve zeroth order estimates for the gradient/Hessian. Although the asymptotic convergence of these algorithms has been established in prior work, finite-time guarantees of two-timescale stochastic optimization algorithms in zeroth order settings have not been provided previously. For our Newton algorithm, we derive mean-squared error bounds for the Hessian estimator and establish a finite-time bound on $\min\limits_{0 \le m \le T} \mathbb{E}\| \nabla J(θ(m)) \|^2$, showing convergence to first-order stationary points. The analysis explicitly characterizes the interaction between multiple time-scales and the propagation of estimation errors. We further identify step-size choices that balance dominant error terms and achieve near-optimal convergence rates. We also provide corresponding finite-time guarantees for the gradient algorithm under the same framework. The theoretical results are further validated through experiments on the Continuous Mountain Car environment.

☆ Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection in Spacecraft Telemetry on Edge Devices

Christopher Goetze, Tim Schlippe, Daniel Lakey

Spacecraft anomaly detection is critical for mission safety, yet deploying sophisticated models on-board presents significant challenges due to hardware constraints. This paper investigates three approaches for spacecraft telemetry anomaly detection -- forecasting & threshold, direct classification, and image classification -- and optimizes them for edge deployment using multi-objective neural architecture optimization on the European Space Agency Anomaly Dataset. Our baseline experiments demonstrate that forecasting & threshold achieves superior detection performance (92.7% Corrected Event-wise F0.5-score (CEF0.5)) [1] compared to alternatives. Through Pareto-optimal architecture optimization, we dramatically reduced computational requirements while maintaining capabilities -- the optimized forecasting & threshold model preserved 88.8% CEF0.5 while reducing RAM usage by 97.1% to just 59 KB and operations by 99.4%. Analysis of deployment viability shows our optimized models require just 0.36-6.25% of CubeSat RAM, making on-board anomaly detection practical even on highly constrained hardware. This research demonstrates that sophisticated anomaly detection capabilities can be successfully deployed within spacecraft edge computing constraints, providing near-instantaneous detection without exceeding hardware limitations or compromising mission safety.

comment: IEEE Space Computing Conference (SCC 2025), Los Angeles, CA, USA, 28 July - 1 August 2025

☆ AP-DRL: A Synergistic Algorithm-Hardware Framework for Automatic Task Partitioning of Deep Reinforcement Learning on Versal ACAP

Enlai Li, Zhe Lin, Sharad Sinha, Wei Zhang

Deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated remarkable success across various domains. However, the tight coupling between training and inference processes makes accelerating DRL training an essential challenge for DRL optimization. Two key issues hinder efficient DRL training: (1) the significant variation in computational intensity across different DRL algorithms and even among operations within the same algorithm complicates hardware platform selection, while (2) DRL's wide dynamic range could lead to substantial reward errors with conventional FP16+FP32 mixed-precision quantization. While existing work has primarily focused on accelerating DRL for specific computing units or optimizing inference-stage quantization, we propose AP-DRL to address the above challenges. AP-DRL is an automatic task partitioning framework that harnesses the heterogeneous architecture of AMD Versal ACAP (integrating CPUs, FPGAs, and AI Engines) to accelerate DRL training through intelligent hardware-aware optimization. Our approach begins with bottleneck analysis of CPU, FPGA, and AIE performance across diverse DRL workloads, informing the design principles for AP-DRL's inter-component task partitioning and quantization optimization. The framework then addresses the challenge of platform selection through design space exploration-based profiling and ILP-based partitioning models that match operations to optimal computing units based on their computational characteristics. For the quantization challenge, AP-DRL employs a hardware-aware algorithm coordinating FP32 (CPU), FP16 (FPGA/DSP), and BF16 (AI Engine) operations by leveraging Versal ACAP's native support for these precision formats. Comprehensive experiments indicate that AP-DRL can achieve speedup of up to 4.17$\times$ over programmable logic and up to 3.82$\times$ over AI Engine baselines while maintaining training convergence.

☆ Rigorous Explanations for Tree Ensembles

Yacine Izza, Alexey Ignatiev, Xuanxiang Huang, Peter J. Stuckey, Joao Marques-Silva

Tree ensembles (TEs) find a multitude of practical applications. They represent one of the most general and accurate classes of machine learning methods. While they are typically quite concise in representation, their operation remains inscrutable to human decision makers. One solution to build trust in the operation of TEs is to automatically identify explanations for the predictions made. Evidently, we can only achieve trust using explanations, if those explanations are rigorous, that is truly reflect properties of the underlying predictor they explain This paper investigates the computation of rigorously-defined, logically-sound explanations for the concrete case of two well-known examples of tree ensembles, namely random forests and boosted trees.

☆ Beyond Corner Patches: Semantics-Aware Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning

Kavindu Herath, Joshua Zhao, Saurabh Bagchi

Backdoor attacks on federated learning (FL) are most often evaluated with synthetic corner patches or out-of-distribution (OOD) patterns that are unlikely to arise in practice. In this paper, we revisit the backdoor threat to standard FL (a single global model) under a more realistic setting where triggers must be semantically meaningful, in-distribution, and visually plausible. We propose SABLE, a Semantics-Aware Backdoor for LEarning in federated settings, which constructs natural, content-consistent triggers (e.g., semantic attribute changes such as sunglasses) and optimizes an aggregation-aware malicious objective with feature separation and parameter regularization to keep attacker updates close to benign ones. We instantiate SABLE on CelebA hair-color classification and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), poisoning only a small, interpretable subset of each malicious client's local data while otherwise following the standard FL protocol. Across heterogeneous client partitions and multiple aggregation rules (FedAvg, Trimmed Mean, MultiKrum, and FLAME), our semantics-driven triggers achieve high targeted attack success rates while preserving benign test accuracy. These results show that semantics-aligned backdoors remain a potent and practical threat in federated learning, and that robustness claims based solely on synthetic patch triggers can be overly optimistic.

☆ LGFNet: Local-Global Fusion Network with Fidelity Gap Delta Learning for Multi-Source Aerodynamics

Qinye Zhu, Yu Xiang, Jun Zhang, Wenyong Wang

The precise fusion of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) data, wind tunnel tests data, and flight tests data in aerodynamic area is essential for obtaining comprehensive knowledge of both localized flow structures and global aerodynamic trends across the entire flight envelope. However, existing methodologies often struggle to balance high-resolution local fidelity with wide-range global dependency, leading to either a loss of sharp discontinuities or an inability to capture long-range topological correlations. We propose Local-Global Fusion Network (LGFNet) for multi-scale feature decomposition to extract this dual-natured aerodynamic knowledge. To this end, LGFNet combines a spatial perception layer that integrates a sliding window mechanism with a relational reasoning layer based on self-attention, simultaneously reinforcing the continuity of fine-grained local features (e.g., shock waves) and capturing long-range flow information. Furthermore, the fidelity gap delta learning (FGDL) strategy is proposed to treat CFD data as a "low-frequency carrier" to explicitly approximate nonlinear discrepancies. This approach prevents unphysical smoothing while inheriting the foundational physical trends from the simulation baseline. Experiments demonstrate that LGFNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both accuracy and uncertainty reduction across diverse aerodynamic scenarios.

☆ From Physics to Surrogate Intelligence: A Unified Electro-Thermo-Optimization Framework for TSV Networks

Mohamed Gharib, Leonid Popryho, Inna Partin-Vaisband

High-density through-substrate vias (TSVs) enable 2.5D/3D heterogeneous integration but introduce significant signal-integrity and thermal-reliability challenges due to electrical coupling, insertion loss, and self-heating. Conventional full-wave finite-element method (FEM) simulations provide high accuracy but become computationally prohibitive for large design-space exploration. This work presents a scalable electro-thermal modeling and optimization framework that combines physics-informed analytical modeling, graph neural network (GNN) surrogates, and full-wave sign-off validation. A multi-conductor analytical model computes broadband S-parameters and effective anisotropic thermal conductivities of TSV arrays, achieving $5\%-10\%$ relative Frobenius error (RFE) across array sizes up to $15x15$. A physics-informed GNN surrogate (TSV-PhGNN), trained on analytical data and fine-tuned with HFSS simulations, generalizes to larger arrays with RFE below $2\%$ and nearly constant variance. The surrogate is integrated into a multi-objective Pareto optimization framework targeting reflection coefficient, insertion loss, worst-case crosstalk (NEXT/FEXT), and effective thermal conductivity. Millions of TSV configurations can be explored within minutes, enabling exhaustive layout and geometric optimization that would be infeasible using FEM alone. Final designs are validated with Ansys HFSS and Mechanical, showing strong agreement. The proposed framework enables rapid electro-thermal co-design of TSV arrays while reducing per-design evaluation time by more than six orders of magnitude.

comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (IEEE TCAD)

☆ Lie Generator Networks for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations

Shafayeth Jamil, Rehan Kapadia

Linear dynamical systems are fully characterized by their eigenspectra, accessible directly from the generator of the dynamics. For nonlinear systems governed by partial differential equations, no equivalent theory exists. We introduce Lie Generator Network--Koopman (LGN-KM), a neural operator that lifts nonlinear dynamics into a linear latent space and learns the continuous-time Koopman generator ($L_k$) through a decomposition $L_k = S - D_k$, where $S$ is skew-symmetric representing conservative inter-modal coupling, and $D_k$ is a positive-definite diagonal encoding modal dissipation. This architectural decomposition enforces stability and enables interpretability through direct spectral access to the learned dynamics. On two-dimensional Navier--Stokes turbulence, the generator recovers the known dissipation scaling and a complete multi-branch dispersion relation from trajectory data alone with no physics supervision. Independently trained models at different flow regimes recover matched gauge-invariant spectral structure, exposing a gauge freedom in the Koopman lifting. Because the generator is provably stable, it enables guaranteed long-horizon stability, continuous-time evaluation at arbitrary time, and physics-informed cross-viscosity model transfer.

comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

♻ ☆ When Does Global Attention Help? A Unified Empirical Study on Atomistic Graph Learning

Arindam Chowdhury, Massimiliano Lupo Pasini

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used as surrogates for costly experiments and first-principles simulations to study the behavior of compounds at atomistic scale, and their architectural complexity is constantly increasing to enable the modeling of complex physics. While most recent GNNs combine more traditional message passing neural networks (MPNNs) layers to model short-range interactions with more advanced graph transformers (GTs) with global attention mechanisms to model long-range interactions, it is still unclear when global attention mechanisms provide real benefits over well-tuned MPNN layers due to inconsistent implementations, features, or hyperparameter tuning. We introduce the first unified, reproducible benchmarking framework - built on HydraGNN - that enables seamless switching among four controlled model classes: MPNN, MPNN with chemistry/topology encoders, GPS-style hybrids of MPNN with global attention, and fully fused local-global models with encoders. Using seven diverse open-source datasets for benchmarking across regression and classification tasks, we systematically isolate the contributions of message passing, global attention, and encoder-based feature augmentation. Our study shows that encoder-augmented MPNNs form a robust baseline, while fused local-global models yield the clearest benefits for properties governed by long-range interaction effects. We further quantify the accuracy-compute trade-offs of attention, reporting its overhead in memory. Together, these results establish the first controlled evaluation of global attention in atomistic graph learning and provide a reproducible testbed for future model development.

comment: 44 pages, 8 figures, 19 tables

♻ ☆ Joint Embedding Variational Bayes

Amin Oji, Paul Fieguth

We introduce Variational Joint Embedding (VJE), a reconstruction-free latent-variable framework for non-contrastive self-supervised learning in representation space. VJE maximizes a symmetric conditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) on paired encoder embeddings by defining a conditional likelihood directly on target representations, rather than optimizing a pointwise compatibility objective. The likelihood is instantiated as a heavy-tailed Student--\(t\) distribution on a polar representation of the target embedding, where a directional--radial decomposition separates angular agreement from magnitude consistency and mitigates norm-induced pathologies. The directional factor operates on the unit sphere, yielding a valid variational bound for the associated spherical subdensity model. An amortized inference network parameterizes a diagonal Gaussian posterior whose feature-wise variances are shared with the directional likelihood, yielding anisotropic uncertainty without auxiliary projection heads. Across ImageNet-1K, CIFAR-10/100, and STL-10, VJE is competitive with standard non-contrastive baselines under linear and \(k\)-NN evaluation, while providing probabilistic semantics directly in representation space for downstream uncertainty-aware applications. We validate these semantics through out-of-distribution detection, where representation-space likelihoods yield strong empirical performance. These results position the framework as a principled variational formulation of non-contrastive learning, in which structured feature-wise uncertainty is represented directly in the learned embedding space.

♻ ☆ GenOL: Generating Diverse Examples for Name-only Online Learning

Minhyuk Seo, Seongwon Cho, Minjae Lee, Diganta Misra, Hyeonbeom Choi, Seon Joo Kim, Jonghyun Choi

Online learning methods often rely on supervised data. However, under data distribution shifts, such as in continual learning (CL), where continuously arriving online data streams incorporate new concepts (e.g., classes), real-time manual annotation is impractical due to its costs and latency, which hinder real-time adaptation. To alleviate this, 'name-only' setup has been proposed, requiring only the name of concepts, not the supervised samples. A recent approach tackles this setup by supplementing data with web-scraped images, but such data often suffers from issues of data imbalance, noise, and copyright. To overcome the limitations of both human supervision and webly supervision, we propose GenOL using generative models for name-only training. But naive application of generative models results in limited diversity of generated data. Here, we enhance (i) intra-diversity, the diversity of images generated by a single model, by proposing a diverse prompt generation method that generates diverse text prompts for text-to-image models, and (ii) inter-diversity, the diversity of images generated by multiple generative models, by introducing an ensemble strategy that selects minimally overlapping samples. We empirically validate that the proposed \frameworkname outperforms prior arts, even a model trained with fully supervised data by large margins, in various tasks, including image recognition and multi-modal visual reasoning.

comment: TMLR 2025

♻ ☆ Unsupervised Modular Adaptive Region Growing and RegionMix Classification for Wind Turbine Segmentation

Raül Pérez-Gonzalo, Riccardo Magro, Andreas Espersen, Antonio Agudo

Reliable operation of wind turbines requires frequent inspections, as even minor surface damages can degrade aerodynamic performance, reduce energy output, and accelerate blade wear. Central to automating these inspections is the accurate segmentation of turbine blades from visual data. This task is traditionally addressed through dense, pixel-wise deep learning models. However, such methods demand extensive annotated datasets, posing scalability challenges. In this work, we introduce an annotation-efficient segmentation approach that reframes the pixel-level task into a binary region classification problem. Image regions are generated using a fully unsupervised, interpretable Modular Adaptive Region Growing technique, guided by image-specific Adaptive Thresholding and enhanced by a Region Merging process that consolidates fragmented areas into coherent segments. To improve generalization and classification robustness, we introduce RegionMix, an augmentation strategy that synthesizes new training samples by combining distinct regions. Our framework demonstrates state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy and strong cross-site generalization by consistently segmenting turbine blades across distinct windfarms.

comment: Accepted to WACV 2026

♻ ☆ Understanding and Improving Shampoo and SOAP via Kullback-Leibler Minimization ICLR 2026

Wu Lin, Scott C. Lowe, Felix Dangel, Runa Eschenhagen, Zikun Xu, Roger B. Grosse

Shampoo and its efficient variant, SOAP, employ structured second-moment estimations and have shown strong performance for training neural networks (NNs). In practice, however, Shampoo typically requires step-size grafting with Adam to be competitive, and SOAP mitigates this by applying Adam in Shampoo's eigenbasis -- at the cost of additional memory overhead from Adam in both methods. Prior analyses have largely relied on the Frobenius norm to motivate these estimation schemes. We instead recast their estimation procedures as covariance estimation under Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence minimization, revealing a previously overlooked theoretical limitation and motivating principled redesigns. Building on this perspective, we develop $\textbf{KL-Shampoo}$ and $\textbf{KL-SOAP}$, practical schemes that match or exceed the performance of Shampoo and SOAP in NN pre-training while achieving SOAP-level per-iteration runtime. Notably, KL-Shampoo does not rely on Adam to attain competitive performance, eliminating the memory overhead introduced by Adam. Across our experiments, KL-Shampoo consistently outperforms SOAP, Shampoo, and even KL-SOAP, establishing the KL-based approach as a promising foundation for designing structured methods in NN optimization. An implementation of KL-Shampoo/KL-SOAP is available at https://github.com/yorkerlin/KL-Methods

comment: an extended version of the ICLR 2026 paper (added a sentence about viewing KL-Shampoo from a gradient orthogonalization viewpoint)

♻ ☆ Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb: Improving German-language LLM pre-training with model-based data curation and synthetic data generation ACL 2026

Thomas F Burns, Letitia Parcalabescu, Stephan Wäldchen, Michael Barlow, Gregor Ziegltrum, Volker Stampa, Bastian Harren, Björn Deiseroth

Scaling data quantity is essential for large language models (LLMs), yet recent findings show that data quality can significantly boost performance and training efficiency. We introduce a German-language dataset curation pipeline that combines heuristic and model-based filtering techniques with synthetic data generation. We use our pipeline to create Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb, a 628B-word German pre-training dataset composed of three subsets drawing from: (1) Common Crawl web data (organic subset; 78B words), (2) FineWeb2 (organic subset; 235B), and (3) synthetically-generated data conditioned on actual, organic web data (synthetic subset; 329B). We evaluate our dataset by pre-training both a 1B Llama-style model and an 8B tokeniser-free hierarchical autoregressive transformer (HAT) from scratch. A comparison on German-language benchmarks, including MMMLU, shows significant performance gains of Aleph-Alpha-GermanWeb over FineWeb2 alone. This advantage holds at the 8B scale even when FineWeb2 is enriched by human-curated high-quality data sources such as Wikipedia. Our findings support the growing body of evidence that model-based data curation and synthetic data generation can significantly enhance LLM pre-training datasets.

comment: 17 pages, 3 figures; published at EACL 2026

♻ ☆ From Moments to Models: Graphon-Mixture Learning for Mixup and Contrastive Learning

Ali Azizpour, Reza Ramezanpour, Santiago Segarra

Real-world graph datasets often arise from mixtures of populations, where graphs are generated by multiple distinct underlying distributions. In this work, we propose a unified framework that explicitly models graph data as a mixture of probabilistic graph generative models represented by graphons. To characterize and estimate these graphons, we leverage graph moments (motif densities) to cluster graphs generated from the same underlying model. We establish a novel theoretical guarantee, deriving a tighter bound showing that graphs sampled from structurally similar graphons exhibit similar motif densities with high probability. This result enables principled estimation of graphon mixture components. We show how incorporating estimated graphon mixture components enhances two widely used downstream paradigms: graph data augmentation via mixup and graph contrastive learning. By conditioning these methods on the underlying generative models, we develop graphon-mixture-aware mixup (GMAM) and model-aware graph contrastive learning (MGCL). Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate strong empirical performance. In supervised learning, GMAM outperforms existing augmentation strategies, achieving new state-of-the-art accuracy on 6 out of 7 datasets. In unsupervised learning, MGCL performs competitively across seven benchmark datasets and achieves the lowest average rank overall.

♻ ☆ TransFIRA: Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment

Allen Tu, Kartik Narayan, Joshua Gleason, Jennifer Xu, Matthew Meyn, Tom Goldstein, Vishal M. Patel

Face recognition in unconstrained environments such as surveillance, video, and web imagery must contend with extreme variation in pose, blur, illumination, and occlusion, where conventional visual quality metrics fail to predict whether inputs are truly recognizable to the deployed encoder. Existing FIQA methods typically rely on visual heuristics, curated annotations, or computationally intensive generative pipelines, leaving their predictions detached from the encoder's decision geometry. We introduce TransFIRA (Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment), a lightweight and annotation-free framework that grounds recognizability directly in embedding space. TransFIRA delivers three advances: (i) a definition of recognizability via class-center similarity (CCS) and class-center angular separation (CCAS), yielding the first natural, decision-boundary-aligned criterion for filtering and weighting; (ii) a recognizability-informed aggregation strategy that achieves state-of-the-art verification accuracy on BRIAR and IJB-C while nearly doubling correlation with true recognizability, all without external labels, heuristics, or backbone-specific training; and (iii) new extensions beyond faces, including encoder-grounded explainability that reveals how degradations and subject-specific factors affect recognizability, and the first method for body recognizability assessment. Experiments confirm state-of-the-art results on faces, strong performance on body recognition, and robustness under cross-dataset shifts and out-of-distribution evaluation. Together, these contributions establish TransFIRA as a unified, geometry-driven framework for recognizability assessment that is encoder-specific, accurate, interpretable, and extensible across modalities, significantly advancing FIQA in accuracy, explainability, and scope.

comment: Project Page: https://transfira.github.io/

♻ ☆ SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale

YanZhao Zheng, ZhenTao Zhang, Chao Ma, YuanQiang Yu, JiHuai Zhu, Yong Wu, Tianze Xu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu

Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks. As skill ecosystems grow to tens of thousands of entries, exposing every skill at inference time becomes infeasible. This creates a skill-routing problem: given a user task, the system must identify relevant skills before downstream planning or execution. Existing agent stacks often rely on progressive disclosure, exposing only skill names and descriptions while hiding the full implementation body. We examine this design choice on a SkillsBench-derived benchmark with approximately 80K candidate skills, targeting the practically important setting of large skill registries with heavy overlap. Across representative sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on this setting, hiding the skill body causes a 31--44 percentage point drop in routing accuracy, showing that full skill text is a critical routing signal in this setting rather than a minor metadata refinement. Motivated by this finding, we present SkillRouter, a compact 1.2B full-text retrieve-and-rerank pipeline. SkillRouter achieves 74.0% Hit@1 on our benchmark -- the strongest average top-1 routing performance among the baselines we evaluate -- while using 13$\times$ fewer parameters and running 5.8$\times$ faster than the strongest base pipeline. The ranking gains further generalize to a supplementary benchmark independently constructed from three skill sources. In a complementary end-to-end study across four coding agents, routing gains transfer to improved task success, with larger gains for more capable agents.

♻ ☆ Learning Inter-Atomic Potentials without Explicit Equivariance

Ahmed A. Elhag, Arun Raja, Alex Morehead, Samuel M. Blau, Hongtao Zhao, Christian Tyrchan, Eva Nittinger, Garrett M. Morris, Michael M. Bronstein

Accurate and scalable machine-learned inter-atomic potentials (MLIPs) are essential for molecular simulations ranging from drug discovery to new material design. Current state-of-the-art models enforce roto-translational symmetries through equivariant neural network architectures, a hard-wired inductive bias that can often lead to reduced flexibility, computational efficiency, and scalability. In this work, we introduce TransIP: Transformer-based Inter-Atomic Potentials, a novel training paradigm for interatomic potentials achieving symmetry compliance without explicit architectural constraints. Our approach guides a generic non-equivariant Transformer-based model to learn SO(3)-equivariance by optimizing its representations in the embedding space. Trained on the recent Open Molecules (OMol25) collection, a large and diverse molecular dataset built specifically for MLIPs and covering different types of molecules (including small organics, biomolecular fragments, and electrolyte-like species), TransIP attains comparable performance in machine-learning force fields versus state-of-the-art equivariant baselines. Further, compared to a data augmentation baseline, TransIP achieves 40% to 60% improvement in performance across varying OMol25 dataset sizes. More broadly, our work shows that learned equivariance can be a powerful and efficient alternative to equivariant or augmentation-based MLIP models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ahmed-A-A-Elhag/TransIP.

comment: 22 pages, 7 tables, 11 figures. Under review. Changes from v2 to v3: Added results for new experiments, training models for 80 epochs on OMol25

♻ ☆ Symbol Grounding in Neuro-Symbolic AI: A Gentle Introduction to Reasoning Shortcuts

Emanuele Marconato, Samuele Bortolotti, Emile van Krieken, Paolo Morettin, Elena Umili, Antonio Vergari, Efthymia Tsamoura, Andrea Passerini, Stefano Teso

Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI aims to develop deep neural networks whose predictions comply with prior knowledge encoding, e.g. safety or structural constraints. As such, it represents one of the most promising avenues for reliable and trustworthy AI. The core idea behind NeSy AI is to combine neural and symbolic steps: neural networks are typically responsible for mapping low-level inputs into high-level symbolic concepts, while symbolic reasoning infers predictions compatible with the extracted concepts and the prior knowledge. Despite their promise, it was recently shown that - whenever the concepts are not supervised directly - NeSy models can be affected by Reasoning Shortcuts (RSs). That is, they can achieve high label accuracy by grounding the concepts incorrectly. RSs can compromise the interpretability of the model's explanations, performance in out-of-distribution scenarios, and therefore reliability. At the same time, RSs are difficult to detect and prevent unless concept supervision is available, which is typically not the case. However, the literature on RSs is scattered, making it difficult for researchers and practitioners to understand and tackle this challenging problem. This overview addresses this issue by providing a gentle introduction to RSs, discussing their causes and consequences in intuitive terms. It also reviews and elucidates existing theoretical characterizations of this phenomenon. Finally, it details methods for dealing with RSs, including mitigation and awareness strategies, and maps their benefits and limitations. By reformulating advanced material in a digestible form, this overview aims to provide a unifying perspective on RSs to lower the bar to entry for tackling them. Ultimately, we hope this overview contributes to the development of reliable NeSy and trustworthy AI models.

♻ ☆ Faster Molecular Dynamics with Neural Network Potentials via Distilled Multiple Time-Stepping and Non-Conservative Forces

Nicolaï Gouraud, Côme Cattin, Thomas Plé, Olivier Adjoua, Louis Lagardère, Jean-Philip Piquemal

Following our previous work (J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2026, 17, 5, 1288-1295), we propose the DMTS-NC approach, a distilled multi-time-step (DMTS) strategy using non-conservative (NC) forces to further accelerate atomistic molecular dynamics simulations using foundation neural network models such as FeNNix-Bio1. There, a dual-level reversible reference system propagator algorithm (RESPA) formalism couples a target accurate conservative potential to a simplified distilled representation optimized for the production of non-conservative forces. Despite being non-conservative, the distilled architecture is designed to enforce key physical priors, such as equivariance under rotation and cancellation of atomic force components. These choices facilitate the distillation process and therefore improve drastically the robustness of simulation, significantly limiting abnormal discrepancies between the two models, thus achieving excellent agreement with the forces data. Overall, the DMTS-NC scheme is found to be more stable and efficient than its conservative counterpart with additional speedups reaching 15-30\% over DMTS. Requiring no fine-tuning steps, it is easier to implement and can be pushed to the limit of the systems physical resonances to maintain accuracy while providing maximum efficiency. We obtain additional speedup by combining hydrogen mass repartitioning (HMR), High Hydrogen Friction (HHF) to further extended the largest timestep up to 10fs of our schemes while conserving stability and accuracy. As for DMTS, DMTS-NC is applicable to any neural network potential and can be applied to approaches that are computationally heavier than FeNNix-Bio1. We show a proof of principle applying the approach to the distillation of MACE-OFF23 with consequent speedups ranging from 3.66 to 5.64 compared to single timestep.

♻ ☆ NES: An Instruction-Free, Low-Latency Next Edit Suggestion Framework Powered by Learned Historical Editing Trajectories

Xinfang Chen, Siyang Xiao, Xianying Zhu, Junhong Xie, Ming Liang, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li, Peng Di

Code editing is a frequent yet cognitively demanding task in software development. Existing AI-powered tools often disrupt developer flow by requiring explicit natural language instructions and suffer from high latency, limiting real-world usability. We present NES (Next Edit Suggestion), an instruction-free, low-latency code editing framework that leverages learned historical editing trajectories to implicitly capture developers' goals and coding habits. NES features a dual-model architecture: one model predicts the next edit location and the other generates the precise code change, both without any user instruction. Trained on our open-sourced SFT and DAPO datasets, NES achieves state-of-the-art performance (75.6% location accuracy, 27.7% exact match rate) while delivering suggestions in under 250ms. Deployed at Ant Group, NES serves over 20,000 developers through a seamless Tab-key interaction, achieving effective acceptance rates of 51.55% for location predictions and 43.44% for edits, demonstrating its practical impact in real-world development workflows.

comment: Accepted by FSE'26 Industry Track

♻ ☆ Exploring the Relationship between Brain Hemisphere States and Frequency Bands through Classical Machine Learning and Deep Learning Optimization Techniques with Neurofeedback

Robiul Islam, Dmitry I. Ignatov, Karl Kaberg, Roman Nabatchikov

This study investigates the performance of classifiers across EEG frequency bands, evaluating efficient class prediction for the left and right hemispheres using various optimisers. Three neural network architectures a deep dense network, a shallow three-layer network, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) are implemented and compared using the TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks. Adagrad and RMSprop optimisers consistently outperformed others across frequency bands, with Adagrad excelling in the beta band and RMSprop achieving superior performance in the gamma band. Classical machine learning methods (Linear SVM and Random Forest) achieved perfect classification with 50--100 times faster training times than deep learning models. However, in neurofeedback simulations with real-time performance requirements, the deep neural network demonstrated superior feedback-signal generation (a 44.7% regulation rate versus 0% for classical methods). SHAP analysis reveals the nuanced contributions of EEG frequency bands to model decisions. Overall, the study highlights the importance of selecting a model dependent on the task: classical methods for efficient offline classification and deep learning for adaptive, real-time neurofeedback applications.

♻ ☆ LeLaR: The First In-Orbit Demonstration of an AI-Based Satellite Attitude Controller

Kirill Djebko, Tom Baumann, Erik Dilger, Frank Puppe, Sergio Montenegro

Attitude control is essential for many satellite missions. Classical controllers, however, are time-consuming to design and sensitive to model uncertainties and variations in operational boundary conditions. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a promising alternative by learning adaptive control strategies through autonomous interaction with a simulation environment. Overcoming the Sim2Real gap, which involves deploying an agent trained in simulation onto the real physical satellite, remains a significant challenge. In this work, we present the first successful in-orbit demonstration of an AI-based attitude controller for inertial pointing maneuvers. The controller was trained entirely in simulation and deployed to the InnoCube 3U nanosatellite, which was developed by the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in cooperation with the Technische Universität Berlin, and launched in January 2025. We present the AI agent design, the methodology of the training procedure, the discrepancies between the simulation and the observed behavior of the real satellite, and a comparison of the AI-based attitude controller with the classical PD controller of InnoCube. Steady-state metrics confirm the robust performance of the AI-based controller during repeated in-orbit maneuvers.

comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Access (DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3678816). This is the author's version which has not been fully edited and content may change prior to final publication. 20 pages, 15 figures, 18 tables. The maneuver telemetry datasets are available in the GitHub repository under https://github.com/kdjebko/lelar-in-orbit-data

♻ ☆ Benchmarking Physics-Informed Time-Series Models for Operational Global Station Weather Forecasting

Tao Han, Zhibin Wen, Zhenghao Chen, Dazhao Du, Song Guo, Lei Bai

The development of Time-Series Forecasting (TSF) models is often constrained by the lack of comprehensive datasets, especially in Global Station Weather Forecasting (GSWF), where existing datasets are small, temporally short, and spatially sparse. To address this, we introduce WEATHER-5K, a large-scale observational weather dataset that better reflects real-world conditions, supporting improved model training and evaluation. While recent TSF methods perform well on benchmarks, they lag behind operational Numerical Weather Prediction systems in capturing complex weather dynamics and extreme events. We propose PhysicsFormer, a physics-informed forecasting model combining a dynamic core with a Transformer residual to predict future weather states. Physical consistency is enforced via pressure-wind alignment and energy-aware smoothness losses, ensuring plausible dynamics while capturing complex temporal patterns. We benchmark PhysicsFormer and other TSF models against operational systems across several weather variables, extreme event prediction, and model complexity, providing a comprehensive assessment of the gap between academic TSF models and operational forecasting. The dataset and benchmark implementation are available at: https://github.com/taohan10200/WEATHER-5K.

comment: 34 pages, 20 figures

♻ ☆ Measuring the Predictability of Recommender Systems using Structural Complexity Metrics

Andrés Abeliuk, Alfonso Valderrama, Simón Campos, Marcelo Mendoza

Recommender Systems (RS) shape the filtering and curation of online content, yet we have limited understanding of how predictable their recommendation outputs are. We propose data-driven metrics that quantify the predictability of recommendation datasets by measuring the structural complexity of the user-item interaction matrix. High complexity indicates intricate interaction patterns that are harder to predict; low complexity indicates simpler, more predictable structures. We operationalize structural complexity via data perturbations, using singular value decomposition (SVD) to assess how stable the latent structure remains under perturbations. Our hypothesis is that random perturbations minimally affect highly organized data, but cause substantial structural disruption in intrinsically complex data. By analyzing prediction errors on perturbed interactions, we derive metrics that quantify this sensitivity at both the dataset and the interaction levels, yielding a principled measure of inherent predictability. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our structural complexity metrics correlate with the performance of state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms. We also demonstrate structure-aware data selection: in low-data settings, models trained on a carefully chosen subset of interactions with low structural perturbation error consistently outperform models trained on the full dataset. Thus, structural complexity serves both as a precise diagnostic of dataset complexity and as a principled foundation for efficient, data-centric training of RS.

comment: Accepted at WWW-24 Workshop: DCAI Data-centric Artificial Intelligence

♻ ☆ $R_\text{dm}$: Re-conceptualizing Distribution Matching as a Reward for Diffusion Distillation

Linqian Fan, Peiqin Sun, Tiancheng Wen, Shun Lu, Chengru Song

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but are fundamentally bottlenecked by their slow, iterative sampling process. While diffusion distillation techniques enable high-fidelity, few-step generation, traditional objectives often restrict the student's performance by anchoring it solely to the teacher. Recent approaches have attempted to break this ceiling by integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically through a simple summation of distillation and RL objectives. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm by re-conceptualizing distribution matching as a reward, denoted as $R_\text{dm}$. This unified perspective bridges the algorithmic gap between Diffusion Matching Distillation (DMD) and RL, providing several primary benefits. (1) Enhanced Optimization Stability: We introduce Group Normalized Distribution Matching (GNDM), which adapts standard RL group normalization to stabilize $R_\text{dm}$ estimation. By leveraging group-mean statistics, GNDM establishes a more robust and effective optimization direction. (2) Seamless Reward Integration: Our reward-centric formulation inherently supports adaptive weighting mechanisms, allowing for the fluid combination of DMD with external reward models. (3) Improved Sampling Efficiency: By aligning with RL principles, the framework readily incorporates Importance Sampling (IS), leading to a significant boost in sampling efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GNDM outperforms vanilla DMD, reducing the FID by 1.87. Furthermore, our multi-reward variant, GNDMR, surpasses existing baselines by striking an optimal balance between aesthetic quality and fidelity, achieving a peak HPS of 30.37 and a low FID-SD of 12.21. Ultimately, $R_\text{dm}$ provides a flexible, stable, and efficient framework for real-time, high-fidelity synthesis. Codes are coming soon.

♻ ☆ SO(3)-Equivariant Neural Networks for Learning from Scalar and Vector Fields on Spheres

Francesco Ballerin, Nello Blaser, Erlend Grong

Analyzing scalar and vector fields on the sphere, such as temperature or wind speed and direction on Earth, is a difficult task. Models should respect both the rotational symmetries of the sphere and the inherent symmetries of the vector fields. A class of equivariant models has emerged, which process these spherical signals by applying group convolutions in Fourier space with respect to the three-dimensional rotation group. However, the proposed models are constrained in the choice of convolution kernels and nonlinearities in order to preserve the desired signal properties. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning architecture without these limitations, thus with a richer class of convolution kernels and activation functions. This architecture is suitable for signals consisting of both scalar and vector fields on the sphere, as they can be described as equivariant signals on the three-dimensional rotation group. Experiments show that this architecture generally outperforms standard CNNs and often matches or exceeds the performance of spherical CNNs trained under comparable conditions. However, the advantage over sCNNs is not uniform across all tasks and we observe that incorporating the interaction between different spins in the hidden layers narrows this gap.

♻ ☆ $V_0$: A Generalist Value Model for Any Policy at State Zero

Yi-Kai Zhang, Zhiyuan Yao, Hongyan Hao, Yueqing Sun, Qi Gu, Hui Su, Xunliang Cai, De-Chuan Zhan, Han-Jia Ye

Policy gradient methods rely on a baseline to measure the relative advantage of an action, ensuring the model reinforces behaviors that outperform its current average capability. In the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) using Actor-Critic methods (e.g., PPO), this baseline is typically estimated by a Value Model (Critic) often as large as the policy model itself. However, as the policy continuously evolves, the value model requires expensive, synchronous incremental training to accurately track the shifting capabilities of the policy. To avoid this overhead, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) eliminates the coupled value model by using the average reward of a group of rollouts as the baseline; yet, this approach necessitates extensive sampling to maintain estimation stability. In this paper, we propose $V_0$, a Generalist Value Model capable of estimating the expected performance of any model on unseen prompts without requiring parameter updates. We reframe value estimation by treating the policy's dynamic capability as an explicit context input; specifically, we leverage a history of instruction-performance pairs to dynamically profile the model, departing from the traditional paradigm that relies on parameter fitting to perceive capability shifts. Focusing on value estimation at State Zero (i.e., the initial prompt, hence $V_0$), our model serves as a critical resource scheduler. During GRPO training, $V_0$ predicts success rates prior to rollout, allowing for efficient sampling budget allocation; during deployment, it functions as a router, dispatching instructions to the most cost-effective and suitable model. Empirical results demonstrate that $V_0$ significantly outperforms heuristic budget allocation and achieves a Pareto-optimal trade-off between performance and cost in LLM routing tasks.

♻ ☆ DeepCoT: Deep Continual Transformers for Real-Time Inference on Data Streams

Ginés Carreto Picón, Peng Yuan Zhou, Qi Zhang, Alexandros Iosifidis

Transformer-based models have dramatically increased their size and parameter count to tackle increasingly complex tasks. At the same time, there is a growing demand for high performance, low-latency inference on devices with limited resources. In particular, stream data inference is typically performed over a sliding temporal window, leading to highly redundant computations. While the recent Continual Transformers started addressing this issue, they can be effectively used only in shallow models, which limits their scope and generalization power. In this paper, we propose the Deep Continual Transformer (DeepCoT), a redundancy-free encoder attention mechanism that can be applied over existing deep encoder architectures with minimal changes. In our experiments over audio, video, and text streams, we show that DeepCoTs retain comparative performance to their non-continual baselines while offering a linear computational cost for all Transformer layers, which reduces up to two orders of magnitude in the running time compared to previous efficient models.

comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

♻ ☆ Principal Prototype Analysis on Manifold for Interpretable Reinforcement Learning

Bodla Krishna Vamshi, Haizhao Yang

Recent years have witnessed the widespread adoption of reinforcement learning (RL), from solving real-time games to fine-tuning large language models using human preference data significantly improving alignment with user expectations. However, as model complexity grows exponentially, the interpretability of these systems becomes increasingly challenging. While numerous explainability methods have been developed for computer vision and natural language processing to elucidate both local and global reasoning patterns, their application to RL remains limited. Direct extensions of these methods often struggle to maintain the delicate balance between interpretability and performance within RL settings. Prototype-Wrapper Networks (PW-Nets) have recently shown promise in bridging this gap by enhancing explainability in RL domains without sacrificing the efficiency of the original black-box models. However, these methods typically require manually defined reference prototypes, which often necessitate expert domain knowledge. In this work, we propose a method that removes this dependency by automatically selecting optimal prototypes from the available data. Preliminary experiments on standard Gym environments demonstrate that our approach matches the performance of existing PW-Nets, while remaining competitive with the original black-box models.

♻ ☆ Neural Graduated Assignment for Maximum Common Edge Subgraphs ICLR 2026

Chaolong Ying, Yingqi Ruan, Xuemin Chen, Yaomin Wang, Tianshu Yu

The Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem is a crucial challenge with significant implications in domains such as biology and chemistry. Traditional approaches, which include transformations into max-clique and search-based algorithms, suffer from scalability issues when dealing with larger instances. This paper introduces ``Neural Graduated Assignment'' (NGA), a simple, scalable, unsupervised-training-based method that addresses these limitations. Central to NGA is stacking of differentiable assignment optimization with neural components, enabling high-dimensional parameterization of the matching process through a learnable temperature mechanism. We further theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of NGA, showing its design leads to fast convergence, better exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and ability to escape local optima. Extensive experiments across MCES computation, graph similarity estimation, and graph retrieval tasks reveal that NGA not only significantly improves computation time and scalability on large instances but also enhances performance compared to existing methodologies. The introduction of NGA marks a significant advancement in the computation of MCES and offers insights into other assignment problems.

comment: Published at ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ ProxyAttn: Guided Sparse Attention via Representative Heads ICLR 2026

Yixuan Wang, Huang He, Siqi Bao, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms limits the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) on long-text tasks. Recently, methods that dynamically estimate block importance have enabled efficient block sparse attention, leading to significant acceleration in long-text pre-filling of LLMs. However, their coarse-grained estimation inevitably leads to performance degradation at high sparsity rates. In this work, we propose ProxyAttn, a training-free sparse attention algorithm that achieves more precise block estimation by compressing the dimension of attention heads. Based on our observation of the similarity among multiple attention heads, we use the scores of pooled representative heads to approximate the scores for all heads. To account for the varying sparsity among heads, we also propose a block-aware dynamic budget estimation method. By combining the scores from representative proxy heads with multi-head dynamic budgets, we achieve a more fine-grained block importance evaluation at low computational cost. Experiments on a variety of mainstream models and extensive benchmarks confirm the underlying similarity among attention heads. Leveraging a fine-grained estimation, the proposed method achieves substantial gains in performance and efficiency compared to existing methods. More precisely, ProxyAttn can achieve up to 10.3x attention acceleration and 2.4x prefilling acceleration without significant performance loss. Our code is available at https://github.com/wyxstriker/ProxyAttn.

comment: ICLR 2026 camera ready

♻ ☆ Drift Estimation for Diffusion Processes Using Neural Networks Based on Discretely Observed Independent Paths AAAI

Yuzhen Zhao, Yating Liu, Marc Hoffmann

This paper addresses the nonparametric estimation of the drift function over a compact domain for a time-homogeneous diffusion process, based on high-frequency discrete observations from $N$ independent trajectories. We propose a neural network-based estimator and derive a non-asymptotic convergence rate, decomposed into a training error, an approximation error, and a diffusion-related term scaling as ${\log N}/{N}$. For compositional drift functions, we establish an explicit rate. In the numerical experiments, we consider a drift function with local fluctuations generated by a double-layer compositional structure featuring local oscillations, and show that the empirical convergence rate becomes independent of the input dimension $d$. Compared to the $B$-spline method, the neural network estimator achieves better convergence rates and more effectively captures local features, particularly in higher-dimensional settings.

comment: Accepted for an oral presentation at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26)

♻ ☆ Deep Unfolding: Recent Developments, Theory, and Design Guidelines

Nir Shlezinger, Santiago Segarra, Yi Zhang, Dvir Avrahami, Zohar Davidov, Tirza Routtenberg, Yonina C. Eldar

Optimization methods play a central role in signal processing, serving as the mathematical foundation for inference, estimation, and control. While classical iterative optimization algorithms provide interpretability and theoretical guarantees, they often rely on surrogate objectives, require careful hyperparameter tuning, and exhibit substantial computational latency. Conversely, machine learning (ML ) offers powerful data-driven modeling capabilities but lacks the structure, transparency, and efficiency needed for optimization-driven inference. Deep unfolding has recently emerged as a compelling framework that bridges these two paradigms by systematically transforming iterative optimization algorithms into structured, trainable ML architectures. This article provides a tutorial-style overview of deep unfolding, presenting a unified perspective of methodologies for converting optimization solvers into ML models and highlighting their conceptual, theoretical, and practical implications. We review the foundations of optimization for inference and for learning, introduce four representative design paradigms for deep unfolding, and discuss the distinctive training schemes that arise from their iterative nature. Furthermore, we survey recent theoretical advances that establish convergence and generalization guarantees for unfolded optimizers, and provide comparative qualitative and empirical studies illustrating their relative trade-offs in complexity, interpretability, and robustness.

comment: under review for publication in the IEEE

♻ ☆ Temporal Sepsis Modeling: a Relational and Explainable-by-Design Framework

Vincent Lemaire, Nédra Meloulli, Pierre Jaquet

Sepsis remains one of the most complex and heterogeneous syndromes in intensive care, characterized by diverse physiological trajectories and variable responses to treatment. While deep learning models perform well in the early prediction of sepsis, they often lack interpretability and ignore latent patient sub-phenotypes. In this work, we propose a machine learning framework by opening up a new avenue for addressing this issue: a relational approach. Temporal data from electronic medical records (EMRs) are viewed as multivariate patient logs and represented in a relational data schema. Then, a propositionalisation technique (based on classic aggregation/selection functions from the field of relational data) is applied to construct interpretable features to "flatten" the data. Finally, the flattened data is classified using a selective naive Bayesian classifier. Experimental validation demonstrates the relevance of the suggested approach as well as its extreme interpretability. The interpretation is fourfold: univariate, global, local, and counterfactual.

♻ ☆ Beyond Hard Constraints: Budget-Conditioned Reachability For Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning

Janaka Chathuranga Brahmanage, Akshat Kumar

Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward maximization with safety constraints, often conflicting objectives, that can lead to unstable min/max, adversarial optimization. A promising alternative is safety reachability analysis, which precomputes a forward-invariant safe state, action set, ensuring that an agent starting inside this set remains safe indefinitely. Yet, most reachability based methods address only hard safety constraints, and little work extends reachability to cumulative cost constraints. To address this, first, we define a safetyconditioned reachability set that decouples reward maximization from cumulative safety cost constraints. Second, we show how this set enforces safety constraints without unstable min/max or Lagrangian optimization, yielding a novel offline safe RL algorithm that learns a safe policy from a fixed dataset without environment interaction. Finally, experiments on standard offline safe RL benchmarks, and a real world maritime navigation task demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms state of the art baselines while maintaining safety.

comment: Accepted to the 36th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2026)

♻ ☆ Variational inference via radial transport

Luca Ghafourpour, Sinho Chewi, Alessio Figalli, Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $π$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions might not capture the correct radial profile of $π$, resulting in poor coverage. In this work, we approach the VI problem from the perspective of optimizing over these radial profiles. Our algorithm radVI is a cheap, effective add-on to many existing VI schemes, such as Gaussian (mean-field) VI and Laplace approximation. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for our algorithm, owing to recent developments in optimization over the Wasserstein space--the space of probability distributions endowed with the Wasserstein distance--and new regularity properties of radial transport maps in the style of Caffarelli (2000).

♻ ☆ Precision autotuning for linear solvers via contextual bandit-based RL

Erin Carson, Xinye Chen

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for adaptive precision tuning for linear solvers, which can be extended to general algorithms. The framework is formulated as a contextual bandit problem and solved using incremental action-value estimation with a discretized state space to select optimal precision configurations for computational steps, balancing precision and computational efficiency. To verify its effectiveness, we apply the framework to iterative refinement for solving linear systems $Ax = b$. In this application, our approach dynamically chooses precisions based on calculated features from the system while maintaining acceptable accuracy and convergence. In detail, an action-value estimator takes discretized features (e.g., approximate condition number and matrix norm) as input and outputs estimated action values, from which a policy selects the actions (chosen precision configurations for specific steps), optimized via an $ε$-greedy strategy to maximize a multi-objective reward to balance accuracy and computational cost. Empirical results demonstrate effective precision selection, reducing computational cost while maintaining accuracy comparable to double-precision baselines. The framework generalizes to diverse out-of-sample data and provides insights into applying RL precision selection to other numerical algorithms, advancing mixed-precision numerical methods in scientific computing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on precision autotuning with RL with verification on unseen datasets.

♻ ☆ Real-Time Operator Takeover for Visuomotor Diffusion Policy Training

Marco Moletta, Michael C. Welle, Nils Ingelhag, Jesper Munkeby, Danica Kragic

We present a Real-Time Operator Takeover (RTOT) paradigm that enables operators to seamlessly take control of a live visuomotor diffusion policy, guiding the system back to desirable states or providing targeted corrective demonstrations. Within this framework, the operator can intervene to correct the robot's motion, after which control is smoothly returned to the policy until further intervention is needed. We evaluate the takeover framework on three tasks spanning rigid, deformable, and granular objects, and show that incorporating targeted takeover demonstrations significantly improves policy performance compared with training on an equivalent number of initial demonstrations alone. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of the Mahalanobis distance as a signal for automatically identifying undesirable or out-of-distribution states during execution. Supporting materials, including videos of the initial and takeover demonstrations and all experiments, are available on the project website: https://operator-takeover.github.io/

♻ ☆ MSG: Multi-Stream Generative Policies for Sample-Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Jan Ole von Hartz, Lukas Schweizer, Joschka Boedecker, Abhinav Valada

Generative robot policies such as Flow Matching offer flexible, multi-modal policy learning but are sample-inefficient. Although object-centric policies improve sample efficiency, it does not resolve this limitation. In this work, we propose Multi-Stream Generative Policy (MSG), an inference-time composition framework that trains multiple object-centric policies and combines them at inference to improve generalization and sample efficiency. MSG is model-agnostic and inference-only, hence widely applicable to various generative policies and training paradigms. We perform extensive experiments both in simulation and on a real robot, demonstrating that our approach learns high-quality generative policies from as few as five demonstrations, resulting in a 95% reduction in demonstrations, and improves policy performance by 89 percent compared to single-stream approaches. Furthermore, we present comprehensive ablation studies on various composition strategies and provide practical recommendations for deployment. Finally, MSG enables zero-shot object instance transfer. We make our code publicly available at https://msg.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

♻ ☆ Local Causal Discovery for Statistically Efficient Causal Inference

Mátyás Schubert, Tom Claassen, Sara Magliacane

Causal discovery methods can identify valid adjustment sets for causal effect estimation for a pair of target variables, even when the underlying causal graph is unknown. Global causal discovery methods focus on learning the whole causal graph and therefore enable the recovery of optimal adjustment sets, i.e., sets with the lowest asymptotic variance, but they quickly become computationally prohibitive as the number of variables grows. Local causal discovery methods offer a more scalable alternative by focusing on the local neighborhood of the target variables, but are restricted to statistically suboptimal adjustment sets. In this work, we propose Local Optimal Adjustments Discovery (LOAD), a sound and complete causal discovery approach that combines the computational efficiency of local methods with the statistical optimality of global methods. First, LOAD identifies the causal relation between the targets and tests if the causal effect is identifiable by using only local information. If it is identifiable, it finds the possible descendants of the treatment and infers the optimal adjustment set as the parents of the outcome in a modified forbidden projection. Otherwise, it returns the locally valid parent adjustment sets. In our experiments on synthetic and realistic data LOAD outperforms global methods in scalability, while providing more accurate effect estimation than local methods.

comment: Accepted at AISTATS 2026

♻ ☆ Epistemic Errors of Imperfect Multitask Learners When Distributions Shift

Sabina J. Sloman, Michele Caprio, Samuel Kaski

Uncertainty-aware machine learners, such as Bayesian neural networks, output a quantification of uncertainty instead of a point prediction. We provide uncertainty-aware learners with a principled framework to characterize, and identify ways to eliminate, errors that arise from reducible (epistemic) uncertainty. We introduce a principled definition of epistemic error, and provide a decompositional epistemic error bound which operates in the very general setting of imperfect multitask learning under distribution shift. In this setting, the training (source) data may arise from multiple tasks, the test (target) data may differ systematically from the source data tasks, and/or the learner may not arrive at an accurate characterization of the source data. Our bound separately attributes epistemic errors to each of multiple aspects of the learning procedure and environment. As corollaries of the general result, we provide epistemic error bounds specialized to the settings of Bayesian transfer learning and distribution shift within $ε$-neighborhoods.

♻ ☆ PAIR-Former: Budgeted Relational MIL for miRNA Target Prediction

Jiaqi Yin, Baiming Chen, Jia Fei, Mingjun Yang

Functional miRNA--mRNA targeting is a large-bag prediction problem: each transcript yields a heavy-tailed pool of candidate target sites (CTSs), yet only a pair-level label is observed. We formalize this regime as \emph{Budgeted Relational Multi-Instance Learning (BR-MIL)}, where at most $K$ instances per bag may receive expensive encoding and relational processing under a hard compute budget. We propose \textbf{PAIR-Former} (Pool-Aware Instance-Relational Transformer), a BR-MIL pipeline that performs a cheap full-pool scan, selects up to $K$ diverse CTSs on CPU, and applies a permutation-invariant Set Transformer aggregator on the selected tokens. On miRAW, PAIR-Former outperforms strong pooling baselines at a practical operating budget ($K^\star{=}64$) while providing a controllable accuracy--compute trade-off as $K$ varies. We further provide theory linking budgeted selection to (i) approximation error decreasing with $K$ and (ii) generalization terms governed by $K$ in the expensive relational component.

comment: Preprint. Under review. During the preprint stage, inquiries and feedback can be directed to Jiaqi Yin (yjqhit@gmail.com)

♻ ☆ LLM-Meta-SR: In-Context Learning for Evolving Selection Operators in Symbolic Regression

Hengzhe Zhang, Qi Chen, Bing Xue, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Mengjie Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized algorithm development, yet their application in symbolic regression, where algorithms automatically discover symbolic expressions from data, remains limited. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning framework that enables LLMs to automatically design selection operators for evolutionary symbolic regression algorithms. We first identify two key limitations in existing LLM-based algorithm evolution techniques: lack of semantic guidance and code bloat. The absence of semantic awareness can lead to ineffective exchange of useful code components, while bloat results in unnecessarily complex components; both can hinder evolutionary learning progress or reduce the interpretability of the designed algorithm. To address these issues, we enhance the LLM-based evolution framework for meta-symbolic regression with two key innovations: a complementary, semantics-aware selection operator and bloat control. Additionally, we embed domain knowledge into the prompt, enabling the LLM to generate more effective and contextually relevant selection operators. Our experimental results on symbolic regression benchmarks show that LLMs can devise selection operators that outperform nine expert-designed baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, the evolved operator can further improve a state-of-the-art symbolic regression algorithm, achieving the best performance among 28 symbolic regression and other machine learning algorithms across 116 regression datasets. This demonstrates that LLMs can exceed expert-level algorithm design for symbolic regression.

♻ ☆ How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence

Dharshan Kumaran, Arthur Conmy, Federico Barbero, Simon Osindero, Viorica Patraucean, Petar Velickovic

Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from black-box models. However, how LLMs internally generate such scores remains unknown. We address two questions: first, when confidence is computed - just-in-time when requested, or automatically during answer generation and cached for later retrieval; and second, what verbal confidence represents - token log-probabilities, or a richer evaluation of answer quality? Focusing on Gemma 3 27B and Qwen 2.5 7B, we provide convergent evidence for cached retrieval. Activation steering, patching, noising, and swap experiments reveal that confidence representations emerge at answer-adjacent positions before appearing at the verbalization site. Attention blocking pinpoints the information flow: confidence is gathered from answer tokens, cached at the first post-answer position, then retrieved for output. Critically, linear probing and variance partitioning reveal that these cached representations explain substantial variance in verbal confidence beyond token log-probabilities, suggesting a richer answer-quality evaluation rather than a simple fluency readout. These findings demonstrate that verbal confidence reflects automatic, sophisticated self-evaluation -- not post-hoc reconstruction -- with implications for understanding metacognition in LLMs and improving calibration.

♻ ☆ Operator-Theoretic Foundations and Policy Gradient Methods for General MDPs with Unbounded Costs

Abhishek Gupta, Aditya Mahajan

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs, which differs from the existence result derived previously in the literature. Using the well-established perturbation theory of linear operators, policy difference lemma is established for general MDPs and the Gauteaux derivative of the objective function as a function of the policy operator is derived. By upper bounding the policy difference via the theory of integral probability metric, a new majorization-minimization type policy gradient algorithm for general MDPs is derived. This leads to generalization of many well-known algorithms in reinforcement learning to cases with general state and action spaces. Further, by taking the integral probability metric as maximum mean discrepancy, a low-complexity policy gradient algorithm is derived for finite MDPs. The new algorithm, called MM-RKHS, appears to be superior to PPO algorithm due to low computational complexity, low sample complexity, and faster convergence.

♻ ☆ DeepRV: Accelerating Spatiotemporal Inference with Pre-trained Neural Priors

Jhonathan Navott, Daniel Jenson, Seth Flaxman, Elizaveta Semenova

Gaussian Processes (GPs) provide a flexible and statistically principled foundation for modelling spatiotemporal phenomena, but their $O(N^3)$ scaling makes them intractable for large datasets. Approximate methods such as variational inference (VI), inducing-point (sparse) GPs, low-rank kernel approximations (e.g., Nystrom methods and random Fourier features), and approximations such as INLA improve scalability but typically trade off accuracy, calibration, or modelling flexibility. We introduce DeepRV, a neural-network surrogate that replaces GP prior sampling, while closely matching full GP accuracy at inference including hyperparameter estimates, and reducing computational complexity to $O(N^2)$, increasing scalability and inference speed. DeepRV serves as a drop-in replacement for GP prior realisations in e.g. MCMC-based probabilistic programming pipelines, preserving full model flexibility. Across simulated benchmarks, non-separable spatiotemporal GPs, and a real-world application to education deprivation in London (n = 4,994 locations), DeepRV achieves the highest fidelity to exact GPs while substantially accelerating inference. Code is provided in the dl4bi Python package, with all experiments run on a single consumer-grade GPU to ensure accessibility for practitioners.

comment: Code to reproduce all experiments is available in the dl4bi codebase: https://github.com/MLGlobalHealth/dl4bi

♻ ☆ When fractional quasi p-norms concentrate

Ivan Y. Tyukin, Bogdan Grechuk, Evgeny M. Mirkes, Alexander N. Gorban

Concentration of distances in high dimension is an important factor for the development and design of stable and reliable data analysis algorithms. In this paper, we address the fundamental long-standing question about the concentration of distances in high dimension for fractional quasi $p$-norms, $p\in(0,1)$. The topic has been at the centre of various theoretical and empirical controversies. Here we, for the first time, identify conditions when fractional quasi $p$-norms concentrate and when they don't. We show that contrary to some earlier suggestions, for broad classes of distributions, fractional quasi $p$-norms admit exponential and uniform in $p$ concentration bounds. For these distributions, the results effectively rule out previously proposed approaches to alleviate concentration by "optimal" setting the values of $p$ in $(0,1)$. At the same time, we specify conditions and the corresponding families of distributions for which one can still control concentration rates by appropriate choices of $p$. We also show that in an arbitrarily small vicinity of a distribution from a large class of distributions for which uniform concentration occurs, there are uncountably many other distributions featuring anti-concentration properties. Importantly, this behavior enables devising relevant data encoding or representation schemes favouring or discouraging distance concentration. The results shed new light on this long-standing problem and resolve the tension around the topic in both theory and empirical evidence reported in the literature.

♻ ☆ A Fast and Generalizable Fourier Neural Operator-Based Surrogate for Melt-Pool Prediction in Laser Processing

Alix Benoit, Toni Ivas, Mateusz Papierz, Asel Sagingalieva, Alexey Melnikov, Elia Iseli

High-fidelity simulations of laser welding capture complex thermo-fluid phenomena, including phase change, free-surface deformation, and keyhole dynamics, however their computational cost limits large-scale process exploration and real-time use. In this work we present the Laser Processing Fourier Neural Operator (LP-FNO), a Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) based surrogate model that learns the parametric solution operator of various laser processes from multiphysics simulations generated with FLOW-3D WELD (registered trademark). Through a novel approach of reformulating the transient problem in the moving laser frame and applying temporal averaging, the system results in a quasi-steady state setting suitable for operator learning, even in the keyhole welding regime. The proposed LP-FNO maps process parameters to three-dimensional temperature fields and melt-pool boundaries across a broad process window spanning conduction and keyhole regimes using the non-dimensional normalized enthalpy formulation. The model achieves temperature prediction errors on the order of 1% and intersection-over-union scores for melt-pool segmentation over 0.9. We demonstrate that a LP-FNO model trained on coarse-resolution data can be evaluated on finer grids, yielding accurate super-resolved predictions in mesh-converged conduction regimes, whereas discrepancies in keyhole regimes reflect unresolved dynamics in the coarse-mesh training data. These results indicate that the LP-FNO provides an efficient surrogate modeling framework for laser welding, enabling prediction of full three-dimensional fields and phase interfaces over wide parameter ranges in just tens of milliseconds, up to a hundred thousand times faster than traditional Finite Volume multi-physics software.

comment: 29 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables

♻ ☆ Early Exiting Predictive Coding Neural Networks for Edge AI

Alaa Zniber, Mounir Ghogho, Ouassim Karrakchou, Mehdi Zakroum

The Internet of Things is transforming various fields, with sensors increasingly embedded in wearables, smart buildings, and connected equipment. While deep learning enables valuable insights from IoT data, conventional models are too computationally demanding for resource-limited edge devices. Moreover, privacy concerns and real-time processing needs make local computation a necessity over cloud-based solutions. Inspired by the brain's energy efficiency, we propose a shallow bidirectional predictive coding network with early exiting, dynamically halting computations once a performance threshold is met. This reduces the memory footprint and computational overhead while maintaining high accuracy. We validate our approach using the CIFAR-10 dataset. Our model achieves performance comparable to deep networks with significantly fewer parameters and lower computational complexity, demonstrating the potential of biologically inspired architectures for efficient edge AI.

♻ ☆ Sparsity-Aware Unlearning for Large Language Models

Yuze Wang, Yujia Tong, Xuan Liu, Junhao Dong

Large Language Models (LLMs) inevitably memorize sensitive information during training, posing significant privacy risks. Machine unlearning has emerged as a promising solution to selectively remove such information without full retraining. However, existing methods are designed for dense models and overlook model sparsification, an essential technique for efficient LLM deployment. We find that unlearning effectiveness degrades substantially on sparse models. Through empirical analysis, we reveal that this degradation occurs because existing unlearning methods require updating all parameters, yet sparsification prunes substantial weights to zero, fundamentally limiting the model's forgetting capacity. To address this challenge, we propose Sparsity-Aware Unlearning (SAU), which decouples unlearning from sparsification objectives through gradient masking that redirects updates to surviving weights, combined with importance-aware redistribution to compensate for pruned parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAU significantly outperforms existing methods on sparse LLMs, achieving effective forgetting while preserving model utility.

♻ ☆ Towards a Certificate of Trust: Task-Aware OOD Detection for Scientific AI

Bogdan Raonić, Siddhartha Mishra, Samuel Lanthaler

Data-driven models are increasingly adopted in critical scientific fields like weather forecasting and fluid dynamics. These methods can fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, but detecting such failures in regression tasks is an open challenge. We propose a new OOD detection method based on estimating joint likelihoods using a score-based diffusion model. This approach considers not just the input but also the regression model's prediction, providing a task-aware reliability score. Across numerous scientific datasets, including PDE datasets, satellite imagery and brain tumor segmentation, we show that this likelihood strongly correlates with prediction error. Our work provides a foundational step towards building a verifiable 'certificate of trust', thereby offering a practical tool for assessing the trustworthiness of AI-based scientific predictions. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/bogdanraonic3/OOD_Detection_ScientificML

♻ ☆ Not All News Is Equal: Topic- and Event-Conditional Sentiment from Finetuned LLMs for Aluminum Price Forecasting

Alvaro Paredes Amorin, Andre Python, Christoph Weisser

By capturing the prevailing sentiment and market mood, textual data has become increasingly vital for forecasting commodity prices, particularly in metal markets. However, the effectiveness of lightweight, finetuned large language models (LLMs) in extracting predictive signals for aluminum prices, and the specific market conditions under which these signals are most informative, remains under-explored. This study generates monthly sentiment scores from English and Chinese news headlines (Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, and China News Service) and integrates them with traditional tabular data, including base metal indices, exchange rates, inflation rates, and energy prices. We evaluate the predictive performance and economic utility of these models through long-short simulations on the Shanghai Metal Exchange from 2007 to 2024. Our results demonstrate that during periods of high volatility, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models incorporating sentiment data from a finetuned Qwen3 model (Sharpe ratio 1.04) significantly outperform baseline models using tabular data alone (Sharpe ratio 0.23). Subsequent analysis elucidates the nuanced roles of news sources, topics, and event types in aluminum price forecasting.

♻ ☆ Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

Mikoto Kudo, Takumi Tanabe, Akifumi Wachi, Youhei Akimoto

Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

comment: 26 pages. Accepted at ICAPS 2026

♻ ☆ Magic Words or Methodical Work? Challenging Conventional Wisdom in LLM-Based Political Text Annotation

Lorcan McLaren, James Cross, Zuzanna Krakowska, Robin Rauner, Martijn Schoonvelde

Political scientists are rapidly adopting large language models (LLMs) for text annotation, yet the sensitivity of annotation results to implementation choices remains poorly understood. Most evaluations test a single model or configuration; how model choice, model size, learning approach, and prompt style interact, and whether popular "best practices" survive controlled comparison, are largely unexplored. We present a controlled evaluation of these pipeline choices, testing six open-weight models across four political science annotation tasks under identical quantisation, hardware, and prompt-template conditions. Our central finding is methodological: interaction effects dominate main effects, so seemingly reasonable pipeline choices can become consequential researcher degrees of freedom. No single model, prompt style, or learning approach is uniformly superior, and the best-performing model varies across tasks. Two corollaries follow. First, model size is an unreliable guide both to cost and to performance: cross-family efficiency differences are so large that some larger models are less resource-intensive than much smaller alternatives, while within model families mid-range variants often match or exceed larger counterparts. Second, widely recommended prompt engineering techniques yield inconsistent and sometimes negative effects on annotation performance. We use these benchmark results to develop a validation-first framework - with a principled ordering of pipeline decisions, guidance on prompt freezing and held-out evaluation, reporting standards, and open-source tools - to help researchers navigate this decision space transparently.

♻ ☆ Enes Causal Discovery

Alexis Kafantaris

Enes The proposed architecture is a mixture of experts, which allows for the model entities, such as the causal relationships, to be further parameterized. More specifically, an attempt is made to exploit a neural net as implementing neurons poses a great challenge for this dataset. To explain, a simple and fast Pearson coefficient linear model usually achieves good scores. An aggressive baseline that requires a really good model to overcome that is. Moreover, there are major limitations when it comes to causal discovery of observational data. Unlike the sachs one did not use interventions but only prior knowledge; the most prohibiting limitation is that of the data which is addressed. Thereafter, the method and the model are described and after that the results are presented.

♻ ☆ Automated Algorithm Design for Auto-Tuning Optimizers

Floris-Jan Willemsen, Niki van Stein, Ben van Werkhoven

Automatic performance tuning (auto-tuning) is essential for optimizing high-performance applications, where vast and irregular search spaces make manual exploration infeasible. While auto-tuners traditionally rely on classical approaches such as evolutionary, annealing, or surrogate-based optimizers, designing algorithms that efficiently find near-optimal configurations robustly across diverse tasks is challenging. We propose a new paradigm: using large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate optimization algorithms tailored to auto-tuning problems. We introduce a framework that prompts LLMs with problem descriptions and search space characteristics to synthesize, test, and iteratively refine specialized optimizers. These generated algorithms are evaluated on four real-world auto-tuning applications across six hardware platforms and compared against the state-of-the-art in two contemporary auto-tuning frameworks. The evaluation demonstrates that providing additional application- and search space-specific information in the generation stage results in an average performance improvement of 30.7% and 14.6%, respectively. In addition, our results show that LLM-generated optimizers can rival, and in various cases outperform, existing human-designed algorithms, with our best-performing generated optimization algorithms achieving an average 72.4% improvement over state-of-the-art optimizers for auto-tuning.

♻ ☆ Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer

Dong Zhuo, Wenzhao Zheng, Jiahe Guo, Yuqi Wu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

Perceiving and reconstructing 3D geometry from videos is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task. To facilitate interactive and low-latency applications, we propose a streaming visual geometry transformer that shares a similar philosophy with autoregressive large language models. We explore a simple and efficient design and employ a causal transformer architecture to process the input sequence in an online manner. We use temporal causal attention and cache the historical keys and values as implicit memory to enable efficient streaming long-term 3D reconstruction. This design can handle low-latency 3D reconstruction by incrementally integrating historical information while maintaining high-quality spatial consistency. For efficient training, we propose to distill knowledge from the dense bidirectional visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT) to our causal model. For inference, our model supports the migration of optimized efficient attention operators (e.g., FlashAttention) from large language models. Extensive experiments on various 3D geometry perception benchmarks demonstrate that our model enhances inference speed in online scenarios while maintaining competitive performance, thereby facilitating scalable and interactive 3D vision systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT.

comment: Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT

♻ ☆ Smooth Quasar-Convex Optimization with Constraints

David Martínez-Rubio

Quasar-convex functions form a broad nonconvex class with applications to linear dynamical systems, generalized linear models, and Riemannian optimization, among others. Current nearly optimal algorithms work only in affine spaces due to the loss of one degree of freedom when working with general convex constraints. Obtaining an accelerated algorithm that makes nearly optimal $\widetilde{O}(1/(γ\sqrt{\varepsilon}))$ first-order queries to a $γ$-quasar convex smooth function \emph{with constraints} was independently asked as an open problem in Martínez-Rubio (2022); Lezane, Langer, and Koolen (2024). In this work, we solve this question by designing an inexact accelerated proximal point algorithm that we implement using a first-order method achieving the aforementioned rate and, as a consequence, we improve the complexity of the accelerated geodesically Riemannian optimization solution in Martínez-Rubio (2022). We also analyze projected gradient descent and Frank-Wolfe algorithms in this constrained quasar-convex setting. To the best of our knowledge, our work provides the first analyses of first-order methods for quasar-convex smooth functions with general convex constraints.

comment: AISTATS 2026 final version

♻ ☆ KARMA: Knowledge-Action Regularized Multimodal Alignment for Personalized Search at Taobao

Zhi Sun, Wenming Zhang, Yi Wei, Liren Yu, Zhixuan Zhang, Dan Ou, Haihong Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are equipped with profound semantic knowledge, making them a natural choice for injecting semantic generalization into personalized search systems. However, in practice we find that directly fine-tuning LLMs on industrial personalized tasks (e.g. next item prediction) often yields suboptimal results. We attribute this bottleneck to a critical Knowledge--Action Gap: the inherent conflict between preserving pre-trained semantic knowledge and aligning with specific personalized actions by discriminative objectives. Empirically, action-only training objectives induce Semantic Collapse, such as attention "sinks". This degradation severely cripples the LLM's generalization, failing to bring improvements to personalized search systems. We propose KARMA (Knowledge--Action Regularized Multimodal Alignment), a unified framework that treats semantic reconstruction as a train-only regularizer. KARMA optimizes a next-interest embedding for retrieval (Action) while enforcing semantic decodability (Knowledge) through two complementary objectives: (i) history-conditioned semantic generation, which anchors optimization to the LLM's native next-token distribution, and (ii) embedding-conditioned semantic reconstruction, which constrains the interest embedding to remain semantically recoverable. On Taobao search system, KARMA mitigates semantic collapse (attention-sink analysis) and improves both action metrics and semantic fidelity. In ablations, semantic decodability yields up to +22.5 HR@200. With KARMA, we achieve +0.25 CTR AUC in ranking, +1.86 HR in pre-ranking and +2.51 HR in recalling. Deployed online with low inference overhead at ranking & pre-ranking stage, KARMA drives +0.9% increase in GMV.

♻ ☆ Explainable histomorphology-based survival prediction of glioblastoma, IDH-wildtype

Jan-Philipp Redlich, Friedrich Feuerhake, Stefan Nikolin, Nadine Sarah Schaadt, Sarah Teuber-Hanselmann, Joachim Weis, Sabine Luttmann, Andrea Eberle, Christoph Buck, Timm Intemann, Pascal Birnstill, Klaus Kraywinkel, Jonas Ort, Peter Boor, André Homeyer

Glioblastoma, IDH-wildtype (GBM-IDHwt) is the most common malignant brain tumor. While histomorphology is a crucial component of GBM-IDHwt diagnosis, it is not further considered for prognosis. Here, we present an explainable artificial intelligence (AI) framework to identify and interpret histomorphological features associated with patient survival. The framework combines an explainable multiple instance learning (MIL) architecture that directly identifies prognostically relevant image tiles with a sparse autoencoder (SAE) that maps these tiles to interpretable visual patterns. The MIL model was trained and evaluated on a new real-world dataset of 720 GBM-IDHwt cases from three hospitals and four cancer registries across Germany. The SAE was trained on 1,878 whole-slide images from five independent public glioblastoma collections. Despite the many factors influencing survival time, our method showed some ability to discriminate between patients living less than 180 days or more than 360 days solely based on histomorphology (AUC: 0.67; 95% CI: 0.63-0.72). Cox proportional hazards regression confirmed a significant survival difference between predicted groups after adjustment for established prognostic factors (hazard ratio: 1.47; 95% CI: 1.26-1.72). Three neuropathologists categorized the identified visual patterns into seven distinct histomorphological groups, revealing both established prognostic features and unexpected associations, the latter being potentially attributable to surgery-related confounders. The presented explainable AI framework facilitates prognostic biomarker discovery in GBM-IDHwt and beyond, highlighting promising histomorphological features for further analysis and exposing potential confounders that would be hidden in black-box models.

♻ ☆ On the Convergence of Muon and Beyond

Da Chang, Yongxiang Liu, Ganzhao Yuan

The Muon optimizer has demonstrated remarkable empirical success in handling matrix-structured parameters for training neural networks. However, a significant gap remains between its practical performance and theoretical understanding. Existing analyses show that the Muon variants achieve only a suboptimal iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/4})$ in stochastic non-convex settings, where $T$ denotes the number of iterations. To study the theoretical limits of Muon, we analyze two momentum-based variance-reduced variants: the one-batch Muon-MVR1 and the two-batch Muon-MVR2. We provide the first rigorous proof that, under horizon-free learning-rate schedules, variance reduction enables Muon-MVR2 to attain the optimal anytime convergence rate $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/3})$, matching the lower bound for this problem class. Under the Polyak--Łojasiewicz (PL) condition, we further establish anytime best-iterate guarantees for the expected square-root suboptimality: Muon-MVR1 achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/4})$, while Muon-MVR2 achieves $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{-1/3})$. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and C4 support the practical effectiveness of the proposed variance-reduced Muon variants.

♻ ☆ Joint Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Localization in WSNs with Distributed Scaled Proximal ADMM Algorithms

Qiaojia Zhu, Xiaojing Shen, Haiqi Liu, Pramod K. Varshney

The integration of cooperative and non-cooperative localization is fundamentally important, as these two modes frequently coexist in wireless sensor networks, especially when sensor positions are uncertain and targets are unable to communicate with the network. This paper presents a joint modeling approach that formulates cooperative and non-cooperative localization as a single optimization problem. By processing both tasks jointly, the proposed method eliminates the latency inherent in sequential approaches that perform cooperative localization first, followed by non-cooperative localization. However, this joint formulation introduces complex variable coupling, posing challenges in both modeling and optimization. To address this coupling, we introduce auxiliary variables that enable structural decoupling and facilitate distributed computation. Building on this formulation, we develop the Scaled Proximal Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Joint Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Localization (SP-ADMM-JCNL). Leveraging the structured design of the problem, we provide theoretical guarantees that the algorithm generates a sequence converging globally to a KKT point of the reformulated problem, and further to a critical point of the original non-convex objective function, with the convergence rate of O(1/T). Experiments demonstrate that SP-ADMM-JCNL achieves accurate and reliable localization performance.

♻ ☆ Super-Resolved Canopy Height Mapping from Sentinel-2 Time Series Using LiDAR HD Reference Data across Metropolitan France

Ekaterina Kalinicheva, Florian Helen, Stéphane Mermoz, Florian Mouret, Milena Planells

Fine-scale forest monitoring is essential for understanding canopy structure and its dynamics, which are key indicators of carbon stocks, biodiversity, and forest health. Deep learning is particularly effective for this task, as it integrates spectral, temporal, and spatial signals that jointly reflect the canopy structure. To address this need, we introduce THREASURE-Net, a novel end-to-end framework for Tree Height Regression And Super-Resolution. The model is trained on Sentinel-2 time series using reference height metrics derived from LiDAR HD data at multiple spatial resolutions over Metropolitan France to produce annual height maps. We evaluate three model variants, producing tree-height predictions at 2.5 m, 5 m, and 10 m resolution. THREASURE-Net does not rely on any pretrained model nor on reference very high resolution optical imagery to train its super-resolution module; instead, it learns solely from LiDAR-derived height information. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods based on Sentinel data and is competitive with methods based on very high resolution imagery. It can be deployed to generate high-precision annual canopy-height maps, achieving mean absolute errors of 2.63 m, 2.70 m, and 2.88 m at 2.5 m, 5 m, and 10 m resolution, respectively. These results highlight the potential of THREASURE-Net for scalable and cost-effective structural monitoring of temperate forests using only freely available satellite data. The source code for THREASURE-Net is available at: https://github.com/Global-Earth-Observation/threasure-net.

♻ ☆ Denoising the Future: Top-p Distributions for Moving Through Time

Florian Andreas Marwitz, Ralf Möller, Magnus Bender, Marcel Gehrke

Inference in dynamic probabilistic models is a complex task involving expensive operations. In particular, for Hidden Markov Models, the whole state space has to be enumerated for advancing in time. Even states with negligible probabilities are considered, resulting in computational inefficiency and possibly increased noise due to the propagation of unlikely probability mass. We propose to denoise the future and speed up inference by using only the top-p transitions, i.e., the most probable transitions with accumulated probability p. We show that the error introduced by using only the top-p transitions is bound by $p$ and the so-called minimal mixing rate of the underlying model. We also show the same bound when using only the top-p states, which is the same, just for the states. Moreover, in our empirical evaluation, we show that we can, when using top-p transitions, expect speedups of at least an order of magnitude, while the error in terms of total variation distance is below 0.09. Using the top-p states is slower than top-p transitions since we iterate over all states in each time step and sometimes lead empirically to a higher error. With a more sophisticated implementation, the speed-up, if any, would be really small. While top-p transitions look really promising, we cannot recommend top-p states and discuss why it is of the slower, while the error does not necessarily decrease.

comment: Extended version of paper accepted at ECSQARU 2025, extended version submitted to International Journal of Approximate Reasoning

♻ ☆ Real-Time Trustworthiness Scoring for LLM Structured Outputs and Data Extraction

Hui Wen Goh, Jonas Mueller

Structured Outputs from current LLMs exhibit sporadic errors, hindering enterprise AI deployment. We present CONSTRUCT, a real-time uncertainty estimator that scores the trustworthiness of LLM Structured Outputs. Lower-scoring outputs are more likely to contain errors, enabling automatic prioritization of limited human review bandwidth. CONSTRUCT additionally scores the trustworthiness of each field within a Structured Output, helping reviewers quickly identify which parts of the output are incorrect. Our method is suitable for any LLM (including black-box LLM APIs without logprobs), does not require labeled training data or custom model deployment, and supports complex Structured Outputs with heterogeneous fields and nested JSON schemas. We also introduce one of the first public LLM Structured Output benchmarks with reliable ground-truth values. Over this four-dataset benchmark, CONSTRUCT detects errors in outputs from various LLMs (including Gemini 3 and GPT-5) with significantly higher precision/recall than existing techniques.

♻ ☆ EventChat: Implementation and user-centric evaluation of a large language model-driven conversational recommender system for exploring leisure events in an SME context

Hannes Kunstmann, Joseph Ollier, Joel Persson, Florian von Wangenheim

Large language models (LLMs) present an enormous evolution in the strategic potential of conversational recommender systems (CRS). Yet to date, research has predominantly focused upon technical frameworks to implement LLM-driven CRS, rather than end-user evaluations or strategic implications for firms, particularly from the perspective of a small to medium enterprises (SME) that makeup the bedrock of the global economy. In the current paper, we detail the design of an LLM-driven CRS in an SME setting, and its subsequent performance in the field using both objective system metrics and subjective user evaluations. While doing so, we additionally outline a short-form revised ResQue model for evaluating LLM-driven CRS, enabling replicability in a rapidly evolving field. Our results reveal good system performance from a user experience perspective (85.5% recommendation accuracy) but underscore latency, cost, and quality issues challenging business viability. Notably, with a median cost of $0.04 per interaction and a latency of 5.7s, cost-effectiveness and response time emerge as crucial areas for achieving a more user-friendly and economically viable LLM-driven CRS for SME settings. One major driver of these costs is the use of an advanced LLM as a ranker within the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique. Our results additionally indicate that relying solely on approaches such as Prompt-based learning with ChatGPT as the underlying LLM makes it challenging to achieve satisfying quality in a production environment. Strategic considerations for SMEs deploying an LLM-driven CRS are outlined, particularly considering trade-offs in the current technical landscape.

comment: Just accepted version

♻ ☆ MCbiF: Measuring Topological Autocorrelation in Multiscale Clusterings via 2-Parameter Persistent Homology ICLR 2026

Juni Schindler, Mauricio Barahona

Datasets often possess an intrinsic multiscale structure with meaningful descriptions at different levels of coarseness. Such datasets are naturally described as multi-resolution clusterings, i.e., not necessarily hierarchical sequences of partitions across scales. To analyse and compare such sequences, we use tools from topological data analysis and define the Multiscale Clustering Bifiltration (MCbiF), a 2-parameter filtration of abstract simplicial complexes that encodes cluster intersection patterns across scales. The MCbiF is a complete invariant of (non-hierarchical) sequences of partitions and can be interpreted as a higher-order extension of Sankey diagrams, which reduce to dendrograms for hierarchical sequences. We show that the multiparameter persistent homology (MPH) of the MCbiF yields a finitely presented and block decomposable module, and its stable Hilbert functions characterise the topological autocorrelation of the sequence of partitions. In particular, at dimension zero, the MPH captures violations of the refinement order of partitions, whereas at dimension one, the MPH captures higher-order inconsistencies between clusters across scales. We then demonstrate through experiments the use of MCbiF Hilbert functions as interpretable topological feature maps for downstream machine learning tasks, and show that MCbiF feature maps outperform both baseline features and representation learning methods on regression and classification tasks for non-hierarchical sequences of partitions. We also showcase an application of MCbiF to real-world data of non-hierarchical wild mice social grouping patterns across time.

comment: Published as a conference paper at 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026): https://openreview.net/forum?id=E7D6uybODJ

♻ ☆ Image Segmentation via Divisive Normalization: dealing with environmental diversity

Pablo Hernández-Cámara, Jorge Vila-Tomás, Paula Dauden-Oliver, Nuria Alabau-Bosque, Valero Laparra, Jesús Malo

Autonomous driving is a challenging scenario for image segmentation due to the presence of uncontrolled environmental conditions and the eventually catastrophic consequences of failures. Previous work suggested that a biologically motivated computation, the so-called Divisive Normalization, could be useful to deal with image variability, but its effects have not been systematically studied over different data sources and environmental factors. Here we put segmentation U-nets augmented with Divisive Normalization to work far from training conditions to find where this adaptation is more critical. We categorize the scenes according to their radiance level and dynamic range (day/night), and according to their achromatic/chromatic contrasts. We also consider video game (synthetic) images to broaden the range of environments. We check the performance in the extreme percentiles of such categorization. Then, we push the limits further by artificially modifying the images in perceptually/environmentally relevant dimensions: luminance, contrasts and spectral radiance. Results show that neural networks with Divisive Normalization get better results in all the scenarios and their performance remains more stable with regard to the considered environmental factors and nature of the source. Finally, we explain the improvements in segmentation performance in two ways: (1) by quantifying the invariance of the responses that incorporate Divisive Normalization, and (2) by illustrating the adaptive nonlinearity of the different layers that depends on the local activity.

♻ ☆ Image-Specific Adaptation of Transformer Encoders for Compute-Efficient Segmentation

Manyi Yao, Abhishek Aich, Yumin Suh, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Christian Shelton, Manmohan Chandraker

Vision transformer based models bring significant improvements for image segmentation tasks. Although these architectures offer powerful capabilities irrespective of specific segmentation tasks, their use of computational resources can be taxing on deployed devices. One way to overcome this challenge is by adapting the computation level to the specific needs of the input image rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach. To this end, we introduce ECO-M2F or EffiCient TransfOrmer Encoders for Mask2Former-style models. Noting that the encoder module of M2F-style models incur high resource-intensive computations, ECO-M2F provides a strategy to self-select the number of hidden layers in the encoder, conditioned on the input image. To enable this self-selection ability for providing a balance between performance and computational efficiency, we present a three step recipe. The first step is to train the parent architecture to enable early exiting from the encoder. The second step is to create an derived dataset of the ideal number of encoder layers required for each training example. The third step is to use the aforementioned derived dataset to train a gating network that predicts the number of encoder layers to be used, conditioned on the input image. Additionally, to change the computational-accuracy tradeoff, only steps two and three need to be repeated which significantly reduces retraining time. Experiments on the public datasets show that the proposed approach reduces expected encoder computational cost while maintaining performance, adapts to various user compute resources, is flexible in architecture configurations, and can be extended beyond the segmentation task to object detection.

comment: Accepted at WACV 2026 WVAQ

♻ ☆ Quadratic Gradient: A Unified Framework Bridging Gradient Descent and Newton-Type Methods by Synthesizing Hessians and Gradients

John Chiang

Accelerating the convergence of second-order optimization, particularly Newton-type methods, remains a pivotal challenge in algorithmic research. In this paper, we extend previous work on the \textbf{Quadratic Gradient (QG)} and rigorously validate its applicability to general convex numerical optimization problems. We introduce a novel variant of the Quadratic Gradient that departs from the conventional fixed Hessian Newton framework. We present a new way to build a new version of the quadratic gradient. This new quadratic gradient doesn't satisfy the convergence conditions of the fixed Hessian Newton's method. However, experimental results show that it sometimes has a better performance than the original one in convergence rate. While this variant relaxes certain classical convergence constraints, it maintains a positive-definite Hessian proxy and demonstrates comparable, or in some cases superior, empirical performance in convergence rates. Furthermore, we demonstrate that both the original and the proposed QG variants can be effectively applied to non-convex optimization landscapes. A key motivation of our work is the limitation of traditional scalar learning rates. We argue that a diagonal matrix can more effectively accelerate gradient elements at heterogeneous rates. Our findings establish the Quadratic Gradient as a versatile and potent framework for modern optimization. Furthermore, we integrate Hutchinson's Estimator to estimate the Hessian diagonal efficiently via Hessian-vector products. Notably, we demonstrate that the proposed Quadratic Gradient variant is highly effective for Deep Learning architectures, providing a robust second-order alternative to standard adaptive optimizers.

comment: In this work, we proposed an enhanced Adam method via quadratic gradient and applied the quadratic gradient to the general numerical optimization problems. The quadratic gradient can indeed be used to build enhanced gradient methods for general optimization problems. There is a good chance that quadratic gradient can also be applied to quasi-Newton methods, such as the famous BFGS method

♻ ☆ A Machine Learning Based Explainability Framework for Interpreting Swarm Intelligence

Nitin Gupta, Bapi Dutta, Anupam Yadav

Swarm based optimization algorithms have demonstrated remarkable success in solving complex optimization problems. However, their widespread adoption remains sceptical due to limited transparency in how different algorithmic components influence the overall performance of the algorithm. This work presents a multi-faceted interpretability related investigations of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Through this work, we provide a framework that makes the PSO interpretable and explainable using novel machine learning approach. We first developed a comprehensive landscape characterization framework using Exploratory Landscape Analysis to quantify problem difficulty and identify critical features in the problem that affects the optimization performance of PSO. Secondly, we develop an explainable benchmarking framework for PSO. The work successfully decodes how swarm topologies affect information flow, diversity, and convergence. Through systematic experimentation across 24 benchmark functions in multiple dimensions, we establish practical guidelines for topology selection and parameter configuration. A systematic design of decision tree is developed to identify the decision making inside PSO. These findings uncover the black-box nature of PSO, providing more transparency and interpretability to swarm intelligence systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/GitNitin02/ioh_pso.

comment: Upated: 31-03-26

♻ ☆ Hellinger Multimodal Variational Autoencoders

Huyen Vo, Isabel Valera

Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for weakly supervised generative learning with multiple modalities. Predominant methods aggregate unimodal inference distributions using either a product of experts (PoE), a mixture of experts (MoE), or their combinations to approximate the joint posterior. In this work, we revisit multimodal inference through the lens of probabilistic opinion pooling, an optimization-based approach. We start from Hölder pooling with $α=0.5$, which corresponds to the unique symmetric member of the $α\text{-divergence}$ family, and derive a moment-matching approximation, termed Hellinger. We then leverage such an approximation to propose HELVAE, a multimodal VAE that avoids sub-sampling, yielding an efficient yet effective model that: (i) learns more expressive latent representations as additional modalities are observed; and (ii) empirically achieves better trade-offs between generative coherence and quality, outperforming state-of-the-art multimodal VAE models.

comment: Accepted at AISTATS 2026. Camera-ready version

♻ ☆ Value Gradient Sampler: Learning Invariant Value Functions for Equivariant Diffusion Sampling

Himchan Hwang, Hyeokju Jeong, Dong Kyu Shin, Che-Sang Park, Sehee Kweon, Sangwoong Yoon, Frank Chongwoo Park

We propose the Value Gradient Sampler (VGS), a diffusion sampler parameterized by value functions. VGS generates samples from an unnormalized target density (i.e., energy) by evolving randomly initialized particles along the gradient of the value function. In many sampling problems where the target density exhibits invariant symmetries, value functions provide a novel approach to leveraging invariant networks for sampling by inducing an equivariant gradient flow, without requiring more complex equivariant networks. The value networks are trained via temporal difference learning, which supports off-policy training and other established reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. By combining advanced RL methods with efficient invariant networks, VGS achieves both the highest sample quality and the fastest sampling speed among our baselines on the 55-particle Lennard-Jones system.

comment: AISTATS 2026. Code: https://github.com/swyoon/value-gradient-sampler/

♻ ☆ ARROW: An Adaptive Rollout and Routing Method for Global Weather Forecasting ICLR 2026

Jindong Tian, Yifei Ding, Ronghui Xu, Hao Miao, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang

Weather forecasting is a fundamental task in spatiotemporal data analysis, with broad applications across a wide range of domains. Existing data-driven forecasting methods typically model atmospheric dynamics over a fixed short time interval, e.g., 6 hours, and rely on naive autoregression-based rollout for long-term forecasting, e.g., 5 days. However, this paradigm suffers from two key limitations: (1) it often inadequately models the spatial and multi-scale temporal dependencies inherent in global weather systems, and (2) the rollout strategy struggles to balance error accumulation with the capture of fine-grained atmospheric variations. In this study, we propose ARROW, an Adaptive-Rollout Multi-scale temporal Routing method for Global Weather Forecasting. To contend with the first limitation, we construct a multi-interval forecasting model that forecasts weather across different time intervals. Within the model, the Shared-Private Mixture-of-Experts captures both shared patterns and specific characteristics of atmospheric dynamics across different time scales, while Ring Positional Encoding accurately encodes the circular latitude structure of the Earth when representing spatial information. For the second limitation, we develop an adaptive rollout scheduler based on reinforcement learning, which selects the most suitable time interval to forecast according to the current weather state. Experimental results demonstrate that ARROW achieves state-of-the-art performance in global weather forecasting, establishing a promising paradigm in this field.

comment: 25 pages, 16 figures, ICLR 2026 Camera Ready

♻ ☆ The Effect of Attention Head Count on Transformer Approximation ICLR 2026

Penghao Yu, Haotian Jiang, Zeyu Bao, Ruoxi Yu, Qianxiao Li

Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of transformers, with particular emphasis on the role of the number of attention heads. Our analysis begins with the introduction of a generalized $D$-retrieval task, which we prove to be dense in the space of continuous functions, thereby providing the basis for our theoretical framework. We then establish both upper and lower bounds on the parameter complexity required for $ε$-approximation. Specifically, we show that transformers with sufficiently many heads admit efficient approximation, whereas with too few heads, the number of parameters must scale at least as $O(1/ε^{cT})$, for some constant $c$ and sequence length $T$. To the best of our knowledge, this constitutes the first rigorous lower bound of this type in a nonlinear and practically relevant setting. We further examine the single-head case and demonstrate that an embedding dimension of order $O(T)$ allows complete memorization of the input, where approximation is entirely achieved by the feed-forward block. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings with experiments on both synthetic data and real-world tasks, illustrating the practical relevance of our results.

comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026

♻ ☆ Exploring Prime Number Classification: Achieving High Recall Rate and Rapid Convergence with Sparse Encoding

Serin Lee, S. Kim

This paper presents a novel approach at the intersection of machine learning and number theory, focusing on the classification of prime and non-prime numbers. At the core of our research is the development of a highly sparse encoding method, integrated with conventional neural network architectures. This combination has shown promising results, achieving a recall of over 99\% in identifying prime numbers and 79\% for non-prime numbers from an inherently imbalanced sequential series of integers, while exhibiting rapid model convergence before the completion of a single training epoch. We performed training using $10^6$ integers starting from a specified integer and tested on a different range of $2 \times 10^6$ integers extending from $10^6$ to $3 \times 10^6$, offset by the same starting integer. While constrained by the memory capacity of our resources, which limited our analysis to a span of $3\times10^6$, we believe that our study contribute to the application of machine learning in prime number analysis. This work aims to demonstrate the potential of such applications and hopes to inspire further exploration and possibilities in diverse fields.

comment: This work is withdrawn because further analysis showed that the proposed direction does not lead to meaningful or valid conclusions

♻ ☆ FedRG: Unleashing the Representation Geometry for Federated Learning with Noisy Clients

Tian Wen, Zhiqin Yang, Yonggang Zhang, Xuefeng Jiang, Hao Peng, Yuwei Wang, Bo Han

Federated learning (FL) suffers from performance degradation due to the inevitable presence of noisy annotations in distributed scenarios. Existing approaches have advanced in distinguishing noisy samples from the dataset for label correction by leveraging loss values. However, noisy samples recognition relying on scalar loss lacks reliability for FL under heterogeneous scenarios. In this paper, we rethink this paradigm from a representation perspective and propose \method~(\textbf{Fed}erated under \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{G}emometry), which follows \textbf{the principle of ``representation geometry priority''} to recognize noisy labels. Firstly, \method~creates label-agnostic spherical representations by using self-supervision. It then iteratively fits a spherical von Mises-Fisher (vMF) mixture model to this geometry using previously identified clean samples to capture semantic clusters. This geometric evidence is integrated with a semantic-label soft mapping mechanism to derive a distribution divergence between the label-free and annotated label-conditioned feature space, which robustly identifies noisy samples and updates the vMF mixture model with the newly separated clean dataset. Lastly, we employ an additional personalized noise absorption matrix on noisy labels to achieve robust optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that \method~significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for FL with data heterogeneity under diverse noisy clients scenarios.

comment: conference

♻ ☆ Bayesian Additive Regression Trees for functional ANOVA model

Seokhun Park, Insung Kong, Yongdai Kim

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a powerful statistical model that leverages the strengths of Bayesian inference and regression trees. It has received significant attention for capturing complex non-linear relationships and interactions among predictors. However, the accuracy of BART often comes at the cost of interpretability. To address this limitation, we propose ANOVA Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (ANOVA-BART), a novel extension of BART based on the functional ANOVA decomposition, which is used to decompose the variability of a function into different interactions, each representing the contribution of a different set of covariates or factors. Our proposed ANOVA-BART enhances interpretability, preserves and extends the theoretical guarantees of BART, and achieves comparable prediction performance. Specifically, we establish that the posterior concentration rate of ANOVA-BART is nearly minimax optimal, and further provides the same convergence rates for each interaction that are not available for BART. Moreover, comprehensive experiments confirm that ANOVA-BART is comparable to BART in both accuracy and uncertainty quantification, while also demonstrating its effectiveness in component selection. These results suggest that ANOVA-BART offers a compelling alternative to BART by balancing predictive accuracy, interpretability, and theoretical consistency.

♻ ☆ EchoMark: Perceptual Acoustic Environment Transfer with Watermark-Embedded Room Impulse Response

Chenpei Huang, Lingfeng Yao, Kyu In Lee, Lan Emily Zhang, Xun Chen, Miao Pan

Acoustic Environment Matching (AEM) is the task of transferring clean audio into a target acoustic environment, enabling engaging applications such as audio dubbing and auditory immersive virtual reality (VR). Recovering similar room impulse response (RIR) directly from reverberant speech offers more accessible and flexible AEM solution. However, this capability also introduces vulnerabilities of arbitrary ``relocation" if misused by malicious user, such as facilitating advanced voice spoofing attacks or undermining the authenticity of recorded evidence. To address this issue, we propose EchoMark, the first deep learning-based AEM framework that generates perceptually similar RIRs with embedded watermark. Our design tackle the challenges posed by variable RIR characteristics, such as different durations and energy decays, by operating in the latent domain. By jointly optimizing the model with a perceptual loss for RIR reconstruction and a loss for watermark detection, EchoMark achieves both high-quality environment transfer and reliable watermark recovery. Experiments on diverse datasets validate that EchoMark achieves room acoustic parameter matching performance comparable to FiNS, the state-of-the-art RIR estimator. Furthermore, a high Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.22 out of 5, watermark detection accuracy exceeding 99\%, and bit error rates (BER) below 0.3\% collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of EchoMark in preserving perceptual quality while ensuring reliable watermark embedding.

♻ ☆ Deep Polynomial Chaos Expansion

Johannes Exenberger, Sascha Ranftl, Robert Peharz

Polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) is a classical and widely used surrogate modeling technique in physical simulation and uncertainty quantification. By taking a linear combination of a set of basis polynomials - orthonormal with respect to the distribution of uncertain input parameters - PCE enables tractable inference of key statistical quantities such as (conditional) means, variances, covariances, and Sobol sensitivity indices, which are essential for understanding the modeled system and identifying influential parameters and their interactions. The applicability of PCE to high-dimensional problems is limited by poor scalability, as the number of basis functions grows exponentially with the number of parameters. In this paper, we address this challenge by combining PCE with ideas from tractable probabilistic circuits, resulting in deep polynomial chaos expansion (DeepPCE) - a deep generalization of PCE that scales effectively to high-dimensional input spaces. DeepPCE achieves predictive performance comparable to that of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), while retaining PCE's ability to compute exact statistical inferences via simple forward passes. In contrast, such computations in MLPs require costly and often inaccurate approximations, such as Monte Carlo integration.

comment: 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2026

♻ ☆ Optimal High-Probability Regret for Online Convex Optimization with Two-Point Bandit Feedback

Haishan Ye

We consider the problem of Online Convex Optimization (OCO) with two-point bandit feedback in an adversarial environment. In this setting, a player attempts to minimize a sequence of adversarially generated convex loss functions, while only observing the value of each function at two points. While it is well-known that two-point feedback allows for gradient estimation, achieving tight high-probability regret bounds for strongly convex functions still remained open as highlighted by \citet{agarwal2010optimal}. The primary challenge lies in the heavy-tailed nature of bandit gradient estimators, which makes standard concentration analysis difficult. In this paper, we resolve this open challenge by providing the first high-probability regret bound of $O(d(\log T + \log(1/δ))/μ)$ for $μ$-strongly convex losses. Our result is minimax optimal with respect to both the time horizon $T$ and the dimension $d$.

comment: The proof has some drawbacks

♻ ☆ JKO for Landau: a variational particle method for homogeneous Landau equation

Yan Huang, Li Wang

Inspired by the gradient flow viewpoint of the Landau equation and the corresponding dynamic formulation of the Landau metric in [arXiv:2007.08591], we develop a novel implicit particle method for the Landau equation in the framework of the JKO scheme. We first reformulate the Landau metric in a computationally friendly form, and then translate it into the Lagrangian viewpoint using the flow map. A key observation is that, while the flow map evolves according to a rather complicated integral equation, the unknown component is simply a score function of the corresponding density plus an additional term in the null space of the collision kernel. This insight guides us in designing and training the neural network for the flow map. Additionally, the objective function is in a double summation form, making it highly suitable for stochastic methods. Consequently, we design a tailored version of stochastic gradient descent that maintains particle interactions and significantly reduces the computational complexity. Compared to other deterministic particle methods, the proposed method enjoys exact entropy dissipation and unconditional stability, therefore making it suitable for large-scale plasma simulations over extended time periods.

♻ ☆ When Rubrics Fail: Error Enumeration as Reward in Reference-Free RL Post-Training for Virtual Try-On

Wisdom Ikezogwo, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Ranjay Krishna, Karim Bouyarmane

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) have driven strong gains in domains with clear correctness signals and even in subjective domains by synthesizing evaluation criteria from ideal reference answers. But many real-world tasks admit multiple valid outputs and lack the single ideal answer that rubric generation depends on. We identify this reference-free setting as a gap in current post-training methods and propose Implicit Error Counting (IEC) to fill it. Instead of checking what a response gets right against a rubric, IEC enumerates what it gets wrong, applying severity-weighted scores across task-relevant axes and converting them into calibrated per-aspect rewards. We show that naïve explicit enumeration is too noisy for stable optimization, and that two design choices: implicit score emission and group calibration are necessary to make error counting a reliable reward. As a case study, we validate IEC on virtual try-on (VTO), a domain that is simultaneously too constrained for holistic scoring and too permissive for rubric-based evaluation: subtle garment errors are unacceptable, yet many output variations are correct. We introduce Cascaded Error Counting (CEC) as an evaluation metric, which tracks human preferences well (60% top-1 vs. 30% others), and curate Mismatch-DressCode (MDressBench), a benchmark with maximal attribute mismatch to stress-test reward designs. On MDressBench, IEC outperforms RaR across all metrics (CEC: 5.31 vs. 5.60 on flat references; 5.20 vs. 5.53 on non-flat). On VITON-HD and DressCode, IEC matches or surpasses six baselines on 6 of 8 perceptual metrics. These results suggest that when ideal answers are unavailable, counting errors provide a stronger signal than constructing rubrics.

♻ ☆ Align Your Query: Representation Alignment for Multimodality Medical Object Detection

Ara Seo, Bryan Sangwoo Kim, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye

Medical object detection suffers when a single detector is trained on mixed medical modalities (e.g., CXR, CT, MRI) due to heterogeneous statistics and disjoint representation spaces. To address this challenge, we turn to representation alignment, an approach that has proven effective for bringing features from different sources into a shared space. Specifically, we target the representations of DETR-style object queries and propose a simple, detector-agnostic framework to align them with modality context. First, we define modality tokens: compact, text-derived embeddings encoding imaging modality that are lightweight and require no extra annotations. We integrate the modality tokens into the detection process via Multimodality Context Attention (MoCA), mixing object-query representations via self-attention to propagate modality context within the query set. This preserves DETR-style architectures and adds negligible latency while injecting modality cues into object queries. We further introduce QueryREPA, a short pretraining stage that aligns query representations to their modality tokens using a task-specific contrastive objective with modality-balanced batches. Together, MoCA and QueryREPA produce modality-aware, class-faithful queries that transfer effectively to downstream training. Across diverse modalities trained altogether, the proposed approach consistently improves AP with minimal overhead and no architectural modifications, offering a practical path toward robust multimodality medical object detection.

comment: Project page: https://araseo.github.io/alignyourquery/

♻ ☆ Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with SlowFast Sampling: The Three Golden Principles

Qingyan Wei, Yaojie Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Puyu Zeng, Yuxuan Wang, Biqing Qi, Dongrui Liu, Linfeng Zhang

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs by enabling parallel token generation and significantly reducing inference latency. However, existing sampling strategies for dLLMs, such as confidence-based or semi-autoregressive decoding, often suffer from static behavior, leading to suboptimal efficiency and limited flexibility. In this paper, we propose SlowFast Sampling, a novel dynamic sampling strategy that adaptively alternates between exploratory and accelerated decoding stages. Our method is guided by three golden principles: certainty principle, convergence principle, and positional principle, which govern when and where tokens can be confidently and efficiently decoded. We further integrate our strategy with dLLM-Cache to reduce redundant computation. Extensive experiments across benchmarks and models show that SlowFast Sampling achieves up to 15.63$\times$ speedup on LLaDA with minimal accuracy drop, and up to 34.22$\times$ when combined with caching. Notably, our approach outperforms strong autoregressive baselines like LLaMA3 8B in throughput, demonstrating that well-designed sampling can unlock the full potential of dLLMs for fast and high-quality generation.

comment: 11 pages; 5 figures;

♻ ☆ A General Control-Theoretic Approach for Reinforcement Learning: Theory and Algorithms

Weiqin Chen, Mark S. Squillante, Chai Wah Wu, Santiago Paternain

We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman operator and Q-learning, a new control-policy-variable gradient theorem, and a specific gradient ascent algorithm based on this theorem within the context of a specific control-theoretic framework. We empirically evaluate the performance of our control theoretic approach on several classical reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating significant improvements in solution quality, sample complexity, and running time of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.

♻ ☆ ECHO-2: A Large-Scale Distributed Rollout Framework for Cost-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Jie Xiao, Meng Chen, Qingnan Ren, Jingwei Song, Jiaqi Huang, Yangshen Deng, Chris Tong, Wanyi Chen, Suli Wang, Ziqian Bi, Shuo Lu, Yiqun Duan, Xu Wang, Rymon Yu, Ween Yang, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang, Bill Shi

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical stage in post-training large language models (LLMs), involving repeated interaction between rollout generation, reward evaluation, and centralized learning. Distributing rollout execution offers opportunities to leverage more cost-efficient inference resources, but introduces challenges in wide-area coordination and policy dissemination. We present ECHO-2, a distributed RL framework for post-training with remote inference workers and non-negligible dissemination latency. ECHO-2 combines centralized learning with distributed rollouts and treats bounded policy staleness as a user-controlled parameter, enabling rollout generation, dissemination, and training to overlap. We introduce an overlap-based capacity model that relates training time, dissemination latency, and rollout throughput, yielding a practical provisioning rule for sustaining learner utilization. To mitigate dissemination bottlenecks and lower cost, ECHO-2 employs peer-assisted pipelined broadcast and cost-aware activation of heterogeneous workers. Experiments on GRPO post-training of 4B and 8B models under real wide-area bandwidth regimes show that ECHO-2 significantly improves cost efficiency while preserving RL reward comparable to strong baselines.

comment: 23 pages, 7 figures

♻ ☆ A Multi-Agent Rhizomatic Pipeline for Non-Linear Literature Analysis

Julio C. Serrano, Joonas Kevari, Rumy Narayan

Systematic literature reviews in the social sciences overwhelmingly follow arborescent logics -- hierarchical keyword filtering, linear screening, and taxonomic classification -- that suppress the lateral connections, ruptures, and emergent patterns characteristic of complex research landscapes. This research note presents the Rhizomatic Research Agent (V3), a multi-agent computational pipeline grounded in Deleuzian process-relational ontology, designed to conduct non-linear literature analysis through 12 specialized agents operating across a seven-phase architecture. The system was developed in response to the methodological groundwork established by (Narayan2023), who employed rhizomatic inquiry in her doctoral research on sustainable energy transitions but relied on manual, researcher-driven exploration. The Rhizomatic Research Agent operationalizes the six principles of the rhizome -- connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania -- into an automated pipeline integrating large language model (LLM) orchestration, dual-source corpus ingestion from OpenAlex and arXiv, SciBERT semantic topography, and dynamic rupture detection protocols. Preliminary deployment demonstrates the system's capacity to surface cross-disciplinary convergences and structural research gaps that conventional review methods systematically overlook. The pipeline is open-source and extensible to any phenomenon zone where non-linear knowledge mapping is required.

comment: Research note paper, 12 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables

☆ XR is XR: Rethinking MR and XR as Neutral Umbrella Terms

Takeshi Kurata

The term XR is currently widely used as an expression encompassing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). However, there is no clear consensus regarding its origin or meaning. XR is sometimes explained as an abbreviation for Extended Reality, but multiple interpretations exist regarding its etymology and formation process. This paper organizes the historical formation of terminology related to VR, AR, MR, and XR, and reexamines the context in which the term XR emerged and how it has spread. In particular, by presenting a timeline that distinguishes between the coinage of terms and the drivers of their adoption, we suggest that XR, as an umbrella term, functions not as an abbreviation of Extended Reality, but rather as a neutral symbolic label that encompasses multiple "reality"-related terms. Furthermore, we argue that stable usage of terminology, including XR, requires governance through collaboration among academia, industry, and standardization organizations.

comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

☆ HLC: A High-Quality Lightweight Mezzanine Codec Featuring High-Throughput Palette

Chenlong He, Leilei Huang, Wei Li, Hanyang Cui, Zhijian Hao, Xiaoyang Zeng, Yibo Fan

Existing mezzanine image codecs lack specialized screen content coding tools and therefore struggle to maintain high image quality under bandwidth constraints, especially in areas with dense text. Although distribution codecs offer advanced screen content compression techniques, their high computational complexity makes them impractical for mezzanine coding. To address this shortfall, we introduce the High-quality Lightweight Codec (HLC), a solution centered on enabling practical, high-throughput palette for mezzanine coding. The core innovation is a novel data-dependency-free palette that eliminates the throughput bottlenecks. To ensure its effectiveness across all content, a co-designed rate-distortion optimization module arbitrates between the palette and traditional prediction modes, while a data reuse strategy between rate estimation and entropy coding minimizes the overall hardware resources required for the system. Experimental results show that, compared with a 4K@120fps JPEG-XS encoder, HLC achieves the same throughput while using only half the LUT resources and delivers BD-PSNR improvements of 3.461dB, 3.299dB, and 5.312dB on gaming, natural, and text content datasets, respectively.

comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted to IEEE ISCAS 2026. Author accepted manuscript

☆ Editing on the Generative Manifold: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of General Diffusion-Based Image Editing Trade-offs

Yi Hu, Leying Yi, Emily Davis, Finn Carter

Diffusion-based editing has rapidly evolved from curated inpainting tools into general-purpose editors spanning text-guided instruction following, mask-localized edits, drag-based geometric manipulation, exemplar transfer, and training-free composition systems. Despite strong empirical progress, the field lacks a unified treatment of core desiderata that govern practical usability: controllability (how precisely and continuously the user can specify an edit), faithfulness to user intent (semantic alignment to instructions), semantic consistency (preservation of identity and non-target content), locality (containment of changes), and perceptual quality (artifact suppression and detail retention). This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of general diffusion-based image editing, connecting diverse paradigms through a common view of editing as guided transport on a learned image manifold. We first formalize editing as an operator induced by a conditional reverse-time generative process and define task-agnostic metrics capturing instruction adherence, region preservation, semantic consistency, and stability under repeated edits. We then develop theory describing edit dynamics under (i) noise-injection and denoising transport, (ii) inversion-and-edit pipelines and the propagation of inversion errors, and (iii) locality constraints implemented via masked guidance or hard constraints. Under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the learned score or flow field, we derive bounds connecting guidance strength and inversion error to measurable deviations in non-target regions, and we characterize accumulation effects under iterative multi-turn editing. Empirically, we benchmark representative paradigms.

comment: preprint

☆ Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis

Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Shi-Xue Zhang, Zhengkai Jiang, Lucas Wang, Zhao Zhong, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng

Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.

comment: Project Page: https://github.com/shawn0728/Unify-Agent

☆ Mean Masked Autoencoder with Flow-Mixing for Encrypted Traffic Classification

Xiao Liu, Xiaowei Fu, Fuxiang Huang, Lei Zhang

Network traffic classification using self-supervised pre-training models based on Masked Autoencoders (MAE) has demonstrated a huge potential. However, existing methods are confined to isolated byte-level reconstruction of individual flows, lacking adequate perception of the multi-granularity contextual relationship in traffic. To address this limitation, we propose Mean MAE (MMAE), a teacher-student MAE paradigm with flow mixing strategy for building encrypted traffic pre-training model. MMAE employs a self-distillation mechanism for teacher-student interaction, where the teacher provides unmasked flow-level semantic supervision to advance the student from local byte reconstruction to multi-granularity comprehension. To break the information bottleneck in individual flows, we introduce a dynamic Flow Mixing (FlowMix) strategy to replace traditional random masking mechanism. By constructing challenging cross-flow mixed samples with interferences, it compels the model to learn discriminative representations from distorted tokens. Furthermore, we design a Packet-importance aware Mask Predictor (PMP) equipped with an attention bias mechanism that leverages packet-level side-channel statistics to dynamically mask tokens with high semantic density. Numerous experiments on a number of datasets covering encrypted applications, malware, and attack traffic demonstrate that MMAE achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/lx6c78/MMAE

comment: Project page \url{https://github.com/lx6c78/MMAE}

☆ TrafficMoE: Heterogeneity-aware Mixture of Experts for Encrypted Traffic Classification

Qing He, Xiaowei Fu, Lei Zhang

Encrypted traffic classification is a critical task for network security. While deep learning has advanced this field, the occlusion of payload semantics by encryption severely challenges standard modeling approaches. Most existing frameworks rely on static and homogeneous pipelines that apply uniform parameter sharing and static fusion strategies across all inputs. This one-size-fits-all static design is inherently flawed: by forcing structured headers and randomized payloads into a unified processing pipeline, it inevitably entangles the raw protocol signals with stochastic encryption noise, thereby degrading the fine-grained discriminative features. In this paper, we propose TrafficMoE, a framework that breaks through the bottleneck of static modeling by establishing a Disentangle-Filter-Aggregate (DFA) paradigm. Specifically, to resolve the structural between-components conflict, the architecture disentangles headers and payloads using dual-branch sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), enabling modality-specific modeling. To mitigate the impact of stochastic noise, an uncertainty-aware filtering mechanism is introduced to quantify reliability and selectively suppress high-variance representations. Finally, to overcome the limitations of static fusion, a routing-guided strategy aggregates cross-modality features dynamically, that adaptively weighs contributions based on traffic context. With this DFA paradigm, TrafficMoE maximizes representational efficiency by focusing solely on the most discriminative traffic features. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate TrafficMoE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the necessity of heterogeneity-aware modeling in encrypted traffic analysis. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Posuly/TrafficMoE_main.

comment: Project page \url{https://github.com/Posuly/TrafficMoE_main}

☆ Subjective Quality Assessment of Dynamic 3D Meshes in Virtual Reality Environment

Duc V. Nguyen, Nguyen Thi Quynh Ly, Truong Thu Huong

A dynamic 3D mesh is a key component in Virtual Reality applications. However, this type of content demands a significant processing resource for real-time rendering. To reduce processing requirements while preserving the user experience, adjusting the level of detail of 3D meshes based on viewing distance has been proposed. In this paper, we conduct an extensive subjective quality evaluation to investigate the effects of the level of detail and viewing distance on user perception of dynamic 3D meshes in a VR environment. Our evaluation results in a subjective dataset containing user ratings of 320 test stimuli generated from eight dynamic 3D meshes. Result analysis shows that it is possible to remove half of a mesh's faces without causing noticeable degradation in user Quality of Experience (QoE). An evaluation of popular objective quality metrics reveals that both 2D-based and 3D-based metrics have low correlation with subjective scores. Based on the subjective dataset, we develop a novel QoE prediction model that can accurately predict the MOS of a dynamic 3D mesh at a given level of detail and viewing distance. In addition, a QoE-aware resource allocation framework is proposed and evaluated under different resource constraints, showing significant improvement in the total QoE compared to conventional methods.

☆ From Natural Alignment to Conditional Controllability in Multimodal Dialogue ICLR 2026

Zeyu Jin, Songtao Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Minghao Tian, Kaifeng Yun, Zhuo Chen, Xiaoyu Qin, Jia Jia

The recent advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has led to significant strides in modeling human interaction, particularly in the context of multimodal dialogue. While current methods impressively generate realistic dialogue in isolated modalities like speech or vision, challenges remain in controllable Multimodal Dialogue Generation (MDG). This paper focuses on the natural alignment between speech, vision, and text in human interaction, aiming for expressive dialogue generation through multimodal conditional control. To address the insufficient richness and diversity of dialogue expressiveness in existing datasets, we introduce a novel multimodal dialogue annotation pipeline to curate dialogues from movies and TV series with fine-grained annotations in interactional characteristics. The resulting MM-Dia dataset (360+ hours, 54,700 dialogues) facilitates explicitly controlled MDG, specifically through style-controllable dialogue speech synthesis. In parallel, MM-Dia-Bench (309 highly expressive dialogues with visible single-/dual-speaker scenes) serves as a rigorous testbed for implicit cross-modal MDG control, evaluating audio-visual style consistency across modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that training on MM-Dia significantly enhances fine-grained controllability, while evaluations on MM-Dia-Bench reveal limitations in current frameworks to replicate the nuanced expressiveness of human interaction. These findings provides new insights and challenges for multimodal conditional dialogue generation.

comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026

☆ Towards Automatic Soccer Commentary Generation with Knowledge-Enhanced Visual Reasoning ICME 2026

Zeyu Jin, Xiaoyu Qin, Songtao Zhou, Kaifeng Yun, Jia Jia

Soccer commentary plays a crucial role in enhancing the soccer game viewing experience for audiences. Previous studies in automatic soccer commentary generation typically adopt an end-to-end method to generate anonymous live text commentary. Such generated commentary is insufficient in the context of real-world live televised commentary, as it contains anonymous entities, context-dependent errors and lacks statistical insights of the game events. To bridge the gap, we propose GameSight, a two-stage model to address soccer commentary generation as a knowledge-enhanced visual reasoning task, enabling live-televised-like knowledgeable commentary with accurate reference to entities (players and teams). GameSight starts by performing visual reasoning to align anonymous entities with fine-grained visual and contextual analysis. Subsequently, the entity-aligned commentary is refined with knowledge by incorporating external historical statistics and iteratively updated internal game state information. Consequently, GameSight improves the player alignment accuracy by 18.5% on SN-Caption-test-align dataset compared to Gemini 2.5-pro. Combined with further knowledge enhancement, GameSight outperforms in segment-level accuracy and commentary quality, as well as game-level contextual relevance and structural composition. We believe that our work paves the way for a more informative and engaging human-centric experience with the AI sports application. Demo Page: https://gamesight2025.github.io/gamesight2025

comment: Accepted by ICME 2026

♻ ☆ ReAG: Reasoning-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering CVPR 2026

Alberto Compagnoni, Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Federico Cocchi, Davide Caffagni, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence.

comment: CVPR 2026 - Project page: https://aimagelab.github.io/ReAG/

♻ ☆ Fine-grained Image Quality Assessment for Perceptual Image Restoration AAAI2026

Xiangfei Sheng, Xiaofeng Pan, Zhichao Yang, Pengfei Chen, Leida Li

Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in perceptual image restoration (IR), creating an urgent demand for accurate image quality assessment (IQA), which is essential for both performance comparison and algorithm optimization. Unfortunately, the existing IQA metrics exhibit inherent weakness for IR task, particularly when distinguishing fine-grained quality differences among restored images. To address this dilemma, we contribute the first-of-its-kind fine-grained image quality assessment dataset for image restoration, termed FGRestore, comprising 18,408 restored images across six common IR tasks. Beyond conventional scalar quality scores, FGRestore was also annotated with 30,886 fine-grained pairwise preferences. Based on FGRestore, a comprehensive benchmark was conducted on the existing IQA metrics, which reveal significant inconsistencies between score-based IQA evaluations and the fine-grained restoration quality. Motivated by these findings, we further propose FGResQ, a new IQA model specifically designed for image restoration, which features both coarse-grained score regression and fine-grained quality ranking. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that FGResQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art IQA metrics. Codes and model weights have been released in https://sxfly99.github.io/FGResQ-Home.

comment: Accepted by AAAI2026